


Wonderland

by orphan_account



Category: Sonic the Hedgehog - All Media Types, Sonic the Hedgehog - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Character Development, Fantasy, M/M, Mental Institutions, POV Third Person Omniscient, Psychological Drama, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, Psychology
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-05-29
Updated: 2012-05-24
Packaged: 2017-10-19 21:28:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 25
Words: 170,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/205393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sonic is tired of his constantly nagging life and decides to rest at a psychiatric ward. It is until he faces a severe manic episode that he enters Wonderland State, a place that holds another world created by the dead patients. They're all mad here...AU. TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR RAPE, ABUSE, AND SELF-HARM APPLY TO THIS STORY.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Down the Rabbit Hole

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for not adding this earlier when I wrote this story, but there are TRIGGER WARNINGS for rape, child abuse, suicide, and self-harm in this story. IF YOU CANNOT HANDLE THOSE SUBJECTS WELL AT ALL, I advise you to not read this story. I didn’t like writing some of these things when I did, but I felt like I had to set the tone of the story and to make a message in it. I do not wish to harm anyone with this story and please note that I am not anti-religious at all, but it is also a big subject I like to write about and I do not wish to cause religious arguments with this story either.
> 
> I hope you can keep this in mind when you read the story. Thank you.
> 
> Sonic the Hedgehog and all other characters and properties belong to SEGA and Sonic Team.
> 
> The song Blackbird belongs to The Beatles.
> 
> The song March of the Pigs belongs to Nine Inch Nails.

He looked at his shoes, darkened with a splatter of blood. Everything was moving in colorful blurs, like cars in the street at night. He couldn’t tell where he was or what he was doing, except his shoes had this stain, dark against the shiny red of his shoes, and it was from someone. He wasn’t sure if it was from himself or from someone he knew. But he didn’t have time to figure that out. The white jacket was coming, and it was coming to take him away. The blurs that looked like smears from the cars at night in a street filled with a thousand moving colorful eyes were moving around, grabbing him with their wicked needle like hands and fingers, and they shoved him into this white jacket that welcomed him so fondly, hugging him tightly with its sleeves that were tucked within itself so that they couldn’t escape or move, while he heard screams that pierced his eardrum like metallic needles that were just as sharp as these demons’ hands through his brain. His eardrums nearly crackled as he heard the screams etched in his mind, and the only thing in his body that he knew he could move was his mouth, and he screamed back, as the chains locked against him, tightening his lungs that he nearly couldn’t breathe, and he wanted to scream out loud to the bitches who were taking him, taking him to the promise land, to heaven, with their reddened sweet lips and their white glossy smiles and their sharp nails that bled and scratched and clawed his body while he wanted to scream how much he wanted them to fuck themselves. But they smiled, sang, and locked him away.

Prick. Everything slowed down; the blurs were coming into focus, the demon’s medicine running through his veins. The screams were shortened, smaller, nearly becoming mere whispers. To heaven and away! To a land where the angels only sing their pain and away it goes! Off with it lad! Dancing, music, pure melodies not piercing through his head. Just soft tunes that he thought he could dance to while he was inside God’s prison, for the angels who only committed mild crimes against them. Heaven had a prison? Fuck you, he said, this is my story, and I can say it any way I want. I can’t scream anymore, only tell you of the insanity I witnessed, and screaming was such a suitable way to tell you my pain. And away the music went! The trumpets blared, the flutes whistled, the guitars twanged, the drums banged! I can’t tell you how wonderful this music sounded! And I smiled and thought to myself, my God, you sent me here, with these angels who are all naked as they brush up to me with their bare breasts, with their lips that taste like honey, to their sweet voices that are just as sweet as cherries on a tree, telling me to sleep a good night, because tonight is a special night, and I was no longer afraid anymore. Oh how I slept so soundly, how warm their bodies felt! How their wings protected me! And I said to them, “I’m here for you, forever and ever, and I will be in God’s kingdom, for as long as I rest.”

And that was it. He slept. Everything turned black. And the madness no longer rang and sang. The glossy teeth and the red lips no longer smiled, the music was no longer there, and he felt the cold air conditioning again, making his body shiver slightly as he fell to sleep, sleeping in a winter wonderland full of snowman that waved and hot cocoa that always tasted sweet and the pine needles that always reeked of serenity.

 

 

He awoke a few hours later, his vision coming into focus. He wanted to rub his eyes of the crust that crept near them, but he couldn’t, his hands sealed tight like Saran-wrap. He wasn’t sure of why this happened either, as his memory was all a blur, wondering if everything that happened was only a mere fantasy he dreamed up when his head was flying with the wind when he ran everyday at 5 am in the morning. He looked down, away from the white pads that looked like lumpy clouds (or like the crappy mashed potatoes they ate yesterday) seeing the bloody shoes, and a white straitjacket that kept his hands and feet still and locked away. There were people standing outside of the door, their glances looking cold but observant, as they wrote something down in a chart that he knew was about him, while they walked away and began to talk amongst themselves. He couldn’t hear them. The door and glass seemed to only make their talk turn into faint mumbles that he couldn’t decipher. 

So this was it. He was officially considered insane. Here, in this straitjacket, in a padded room, in a mental hospital that didn’t even have many crazy people in it (mostly just people who were depressed and stressed). And his response? He threw back his head and laughed.

Not a crazy laugh. Just a kind of playful laugh as he thought the whole situation was humorous. He was in a hospital that wasn’t tough on the patients, and people probably thought he was crazy enough to have this happen to him, to scream and flap his hands like a loony bird that forgot to sing. And maybe that was why the patients were deemed as “loonies” by the janitors in this ward. They once knew a song, but somehow forgot to sing. Their mind forbade it now as they grew up.

He knew he wasn’t crazy. He still knew his song and still knew his brain was still in his head. The only reason he got stuck in here was because he wanted some peace and quiet from life. But today he had it. He was in a soft room where anyone’s voice, even his own, was barely audible (just as soft as the room) and he was by himself. He tried to stretch his hands and feet, realizing they were now wrapped together like a cocoon, and he grunted and cursed under his breath, barely moving them with all of his strength. They were wrapped so tightly he couldn’t even scratch his ass. Great, he thought. How long do I have to be in here again? For something I did that I’m not completely sure of actually happened? 

He missed being able to walk and run at this moment, missed it more than anything, to feel the wind and sun hitting his face and awakening him more than any cup of coffee or tea could, or any antidepressant pill, his hands sometimes developing a twitch while he sat alone and thought of the wind caressing his face and neck and of the blue face it beheld. He could waste some time walking along these pads or jump around it like those inflatable castles he remembered bouncing in as a child. Those were the days, back when his mind was pure from disease and filth he mused, and back when his mother wasn’t as condescending to him about getting a job and getting good grades. So what of it? Let him bounce around in this little inflatable castle just this once, and let him be free again for a while. The hospital at least granted him freedom in a damn padded cell, where only the looniest of loonies who were too choked up to say a word would go. And it was a damn sad situation to him. If only he knew his song. But it was locked up, just as much as he was.

They would eventually come back and let him free and he could try to explain what happened and apologize for it, whatever that happened that caused him to be here in the first place. Easy-peasy he thought. And he might as well entertain himself while he was stuck in here. So he sang a few songs, letting himself get as loud as he wanted, even pretending there was an audience who cheered for him. Maybe he could explain there were people in his head who applauded his singing. That would get him to stay here even longer, at least for enough days to get away from his parents and his life and his measly paying job, all that stress bullshit he never wanted in the first place but got because God was a giant stuck-up asshole. This place was like a vacation to him. He wanted to get away for two weeks; to a place his insurance would be able to cover, to eat food that tasted like cardboard and to have people care about him and his feelings. So he laughed, and sang, even if everyone looked at him with disapproving glares.

A half-hour later (singing “Sanitarium” by Metallica, wanting to move his hands and feet to the rhythm of the song in his head), a man came in through the door. A blast of cold air from the A/C hit him like a thousand shards of icicles coming from the roughest wind in the Antarctic, and noise. the rest of the staff were discussing about him and he heard the shutting of doors like metal against the walls, loud as an explosion that he thought you would only hear in a war in the Afghans (that his father urged him to join, but he was lucky enough to be rejected). The man was named Jose. He had jet black hair all over his large thick arms and a beard, with mulatto coffee-colored skin and brown eyes, and he freed him of the straitjacket. The first thing Sonic did was stretch his body and legs, so relieved that he had the freedom to move around again. He nearly sprained himself from so much stretching, his body no longer caught in threads and threads of thick leather that was so heavy that it nearly choked him. Then Jose spoke to him in a heavily accentuated voice, sounding jagged and rough as Sonic would think of the Afghans he once nearly saw that his father wanted him to see.

“Sonic, come with me. We taking you to Dr. Vredenburg. Very important. Come with me.”

The hospital probably didn’t have many volunteers, so they actually hired a Mexican immigrant. And once again Sonic heard his father’s voice in his head, about how the immigrants were coming over and taking away all the resources that America rightly had for Americans (like us). But he seemed to do his job well. His arms looked rock-solid. He could restrain and put down even the most violent patients, like what happened last night in his dream, if he was violent at all. It was still faint in his mind, and he could barely tell if it was reality or the staff decided to pull a prank on him. Even if he still wasn’t sure of what exactly happened, why he had blood on his shoes and why he was covered in white leather, he apologized.

“It’s about last night, right? Look, I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, or to make anyone hurt anyone else. I…”

But he looked at his face. Sonic could tell he was serious and not really taking his public apology. He pointed to the doctor’s office with one hand, while carrying a clipboard in the other, filled with scrawlings and a picture of Sonic’s tired worn-down face on it (he remembered he tried to show them how depressed he was and how drunk he was, oh how he tricked them that he drank a 12-pack of beer everyday), and walked him through the bright butterscotch colored walls. The janitors, the ones they always called the other patients loony birds who never knew how to sing, were sweeping and mopping the rooms, the smell of Lysol stinging in his nose as he looked at the pictures, and noticed at once something that was quite out of the ordinary. At least, for a mental hospital.

“Lunatic,” they mumbled. Sonic learned to ignore it over time. The janitors were just hired to clean the hospital. They were never taught to respect the patients. They just simply made their noses smell a lemon-fresh scent in their rooms once in a while. Nothing more.

He noticed one of the pictures was a tree with silver birch, that shined on the canvas almost as much as his quills, with the snow blanketing the ground and the sky a deep rich purple, with a rosy pink hue at the bottom, the first few eaves of morning in a winter wonderland. So comforting. He might as well have a nice cup of hot chocolate with this picture. But it wasn’t exactly that that made it so strange.

He saw on the tiny signature that the picture was made by Vincent Van Gogh.

What a way to represent the hospital, with paintings of a crazy guy who eventually killed himself, he thought to himself. Sonic rolled his eyes.

Sonic walked in the room, running into a doctor with a white scraggly beard, calm, but seemingly tiny blue eyes and he sat in a large black leather seat that looked as comfortable as the white padded room that paled in comparison to the patient’s tiny gray seat, and a large brown wooden desk that nearly encompassed the entire room. Behind him were Plexiglas windows that showed to Sonic how beautiful it was outside. The many fuchsia trees, looking white in the sun, swaying gently in the wind, while there was a group outside of only women, wearing the same cottony baby blue robe he was wearing. He could tell this was the women’s side of the ward being allowed to remember what the sun tasted like. One thing he missed here was being able to go outside whenever he wanted and run as far as he could until his legs became sore and to feel the wind blowing through him as if he became translucent, one with it, becoming brighter in color, becoming the sky itself. There were some windows in his ward, but they were blocked by a chain-link screen so they were all reminded of where they were, in a psychological prison, and that their freedom was stripped away.

And he knew of how much he missed home now. Even if he hated his mother and father right when he came in. Even if he hated their voices. Reprimanding him. Yelling. Telling him what they thought was right and wrong.

The doctor glanced at him with a cruel, stern look, keeping hands balled up together, like a lump of flesh-colored clay, and then he spoke, his voice cold.

“Sonic, do you remember what happened last night? Anything?”

He dodged his question as the sun began to make his quills shimmer brightly, like the ocean on the Caribbean (a vacation he would’ve preferred, but had to make do, because this one was at least free if he didn’t stay here for very long) and to feel the sun on his face was very welcomed, to see the little particles dance in front of him. Maybe he could convince this doctor to let him go outside once in a while.  
“No I don’t sir. There’s blood on my shoes and I was in a white jacket, not being able to move, and I was in the Safety Room. But…”

“Sonic, you were in there because you jabbed a needle in a nurse’s neck. Do you have any recollection of what you thought, what you were going through when this happened? Anything at all?”

He looked down on his shoes. That was why he had blood on them. They looked nearly black when the sun touched it. Everything to him that night was just blears on a canvas, something he couldn’t discern. He digested it slowly, and also thought when he was in heaven in their little prison with all the angels singing in their sweet cherried voices, with that peacefulness overtaking him. But it could be on the account of whatever they injected him with, that serene feeling on those pine needles. They called it Ativan. Just as powerful as Quaaludes. But he heard of people being shot with much worse things, so he knew he should consider himself lucky that that was the medicine of choice here. He heard of Thorazine, a medicine of choice in some hospitals, the demon’s green lunch, and how much it made you want to sleep an entire night away. Or made you completely like a zombie.

“No, I don’t,” he finally said. “Only thought I went to heaven that night. I seriously don’t remember much, or what we even did that night, or whatever set me off to do that…”  
The doctor nodded his head, that motion that Sonic thought they were telling you that they understood when really they were probably thinking of some sarcastic statement or some thought that measured how insane you were. On a scale of 1 to 10, Sonic measures 7 on the batshit insane scale at the moment…

“Sonic, on account of your actions here, we don’t think you’re right for Austin Lakes…”

Sonic abruptly jumped out of his chair, ecstatic. He was free! “Does that mean I can get out of this dump? Maybe I can go outside again! Thank God!”

He was stopped by the doctor’s hand. “Sit down, Sonic. I’m not finished.”

He sighed in exasperation, and then sat back down on his gray chair. So small, not as nice as the padded walls. Or the black leather seat. Whichever. It reminded him of the seats at his favorite burger joint. And now he wished he was truly done with this place so he could grab himself a chili dog.

“Sonic, you’re not right for Austin Lakes Hospital. We decided you’ll be transferred to Wonderland State Hospital, which deals with cases such as yours. We think you have a severe case, a very severe case of manic-depression that makes you listen to risky impulses and urges rather than the staff here. Wonderland State is the right place for you, and we want you to stay there for at least six months.”  
“What?” he nearly hissed, shocked. There goes the promise of a chili dog. Fuck this doctor! “Six months? Are you kidding me? Look, I’m not really crazy! I just put myself in here because life was getting me down and I thought I needed a break! You can’t make me get locked up somewhere for six months! I have to go back to my job whether I like it or not, get back with my parents…”

“Then you have to tell them where you’re going and that you’re going to get treated there, because we can’t help you here. Wonderland is more suited for cases such as yours. The head doctor there, Dr. Aishwarya Splinter, is a very skilled doctor specializing in severe cases, such as severe manic-depression, sociopathic disorders, schizophrenia…and so on. Here in Austin Lakes, we only deal with mild to moderate cases, such as depression. But Sonic, we think this could cause a big disruption in your life if you go back to it. We want you to be treated with the most appropriate care possible, and I only know that Dr. Splinter is the only one who can help you right now. Go back to your room and pack up your things in this bag.” He held up a garbage bag. What a way to tell the staff and this doctor that all his prized possessions were only trash to them.  
“One of the officers will drive you up there once you leave. Goodbye Sonic, and good luck.”

Sonic’s fists were clenched and they shook so much that they became white under his gloves and it nearly hurt him as he walked down the hall, cursing under his breath. He wanted to lash out at everyone in this goddamn hospital. Jose, the patients, especially Dr. Vredenburg for making him stay in an insufferable shit house they dared call a hospital for six months, but he knew doing that would only make his situation worse. He would probably be stuck in the hospital for a year if he ever struck out at anyone with the anger that was simmering inside of him.

He was probably going to be inside that jacket again, and he cringed just thinking of having his arms and legs restrained. He only packed very few things when he came here, a sweatshirt in case the place got as cold as a refrigerator, which he assumed Wonderland would be far worse, like they wanted to freeze all their specimens as they would study them with a knife. He also had a journal they made him keep. Maybe in the next hospital they wouldn’t give him crayons or short pencils to write with when he wrote letters for his girlfriend. She wondered if he was stuck in kindergarten when he had no choice but to scrawl something out with a red crayon, as if he was going to stab himself with a pen for chrissakes.

He waved goodbye to everyone in the hospital, as if they actually were sad at him leaving (they were probably glad that the damn lunatic was leaving now, and now they could go back to how much they were tired and depressed all the time). He noticed that the nurse who was stabbed with a needle (if he could even remember her face at all) wasn’t in the hospital, or even there when he said goodbye to everyone. If it wasn’t for the blood on his shoes they didn’t bother to clean he would’ve wondered if they made it all up. In the midst of his anger, he still hoped she wasn’t dead or severely hurt because of something he could barely memorize doing, but they said nothing about her condition as he went through the doors that had black thick vines crisscrossing it. He thought it might’ve been wrong to bring it back up.

The phosphorescent sun glared in his face, and he thought the 80 degree weather was a welcome change from the cold hospital. He knew he would miss it again as soon as he arrived in this other one that was strangely called Wonderland. He might’ve asked the officer why they called it such a peculiar name. But he was too infuriated with the whole situation that he said nothing to him as he got into his car. It was strange that it was named after a place in a book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but maybe it would mean it would be a nice hospital. But as he thought that, he was about to give out a big, manic laugh that was just as manic as him. It was a state hospital. Of course it wasn’t going to be nice. He heard from the other patients that the first six months you aren’t even allowed to go outside or see your family or friends. You were trapped there. They might as well bury him from the world for six months.

They drove off, Sonic mentally saying “so long” to the pink Japanese trees that stood in front of Austin Lakes. He wasn’t sure why, but they were nice to look at, and he thought he would miss seeing this sight, especially if he was being put away for six months and no one, not even the face of nature, was going to see or hear from him until then. So long to these trees. So long to this freedom. So long to my family and friends. So long to Josephine.

As soon as he got to the “Austin Lakes Behavioral Hospital” sign, looking so nice when really it was a place that reminded him of Satan’s lounge in Hell, he extended his middle finger while the officer was too busy driving and watching the road. He mouthed “fuck you” as they drove into the highway, his old world shrinking, the world that he thought he would get a vacation as nice as Caribbean. It never happened though, did it Sonic? Turns out you’re manic-depressive. Oh what are the odds? And severe too? Were they making this all up? Was this also a dream that they concocted? Who knew? He just knew this world was going to make him smaller when he thought he was so large that he could take down this officer in his car and leave him for dead and be free and go back home, his father completely unaware that a murder just happened. They would surely make him take a liquid that would do that. Just like Alice in Wonderland. And that was why it was named that. Wonderland. What a stupid, odd name. And that world would soon be revealed that it was very odd, and it would make him as small as an ant.


	2. Entering the King of Spades' Kingdom

“We have a new patient, Dr. Splinter,” a cheery voice ushered through the speaker on his desk. He wondered how she could sound so cheery in a serious situation like this. Maybe she was fake. Maybe the cheeriness was only a mask. Maybe she was against her somehow. Maybe she was letting the patients run free. Maybe she was putting strange chemicals in their food or medicine like an evil, rebellious bitch he thought some of these women were, as secret as the skin underneath their clothes, their true natures. Maybe tomorrow he’ll fire her. Maybe.

He was sketching fiercely, his hand flickering like an open flame. So many lines stretched out before him, all connecting, all forming rivers of lead that intersected.

He loved to draw. He drew ever since he was a baby, even if his first lines were all over his father’s books, filled with scribbles of red crayons. But they were amazed at the chemistry he connected with all the lines, forming buildings and people and animals, even some things everyone around him has never seen before. He felt like a magician with the pencil, and he smiled when he created his drawings, seeming to be full of life, so animated, from something as dead and pale as a white piece of paper. It was what he did when he was sitting in the office, alone. Draw. He knew he was damn good at it and he didn’t mind if anyone thought his drawings were rubbish. He would continue to draw, to make his visions become alive and breathing on the page, even if no one appreciated it. He didn’t need anyone. He would just have a love affair with him and his pencil. He would give birth to so many amazing things and so many amazing people. Amazing to him anyways. But he was the only one that truly mattered anymore.

As soon as he saw the officer come in with a blue hedgehog, he stopped the flow of the rivers. For only a little while. 

Sonic looked around his office. He had a great oak desk, with the sides carved with intricate faces of lions that roared at him to keep away from this man and keep away from everything in this hospital, and everything around it was…surreal, with the many drawings of fantasy creatures he never saw before and never knew the names of. His walls were surrounded by them, with the few hints of the wallpaper being dark green, matching the tan carpet that Sonic thought seemed too regal to be in a place like this. As if this office was fit for a king. And that this Dr. Splinter was sitting in his throne.

Dr. Splinter was a middle-aged bald man, with the exception of fire red sideburns on his face and large rectangular glasses. Sonic noticed that this man wasn’t wearing the usual suit and tie like the other doctors he met, but rather a plain white cotton t-shirt and jeans, but still had a tie on. And he knew he had to speak up about how rather ridiculous he looked.

“Well, this place already looks like a sideshow! There’s all these creatures drawn on this wall and you looking like you’re not dressed for the job! Isn’t this therapeutic!”  
This hedgehog was vexing him in his skin like a mosquito bite that came up as a bump that he’ll keep scratching constantly, but he tried to keep himself calm, grinding his teeth, as he introduced himself.

“Hello Sonic. You were transferred from Austin Lakes, is that correct? I’m Dr. Splinter, head doctor of Wonderland State Hospital. And we may seem…out of the ordinary than most state hospitals, but you’re actually in a better place than Austin Lakes…”  
“Fat chance!” Sonic exclaimed, Splinter muttering what sounded like cursing under his breath. “I heard state hospitals are awful! They basically lock you up for six months before you get to even see your family or do anything! That’s how long I’m going to be in here for manic-depression or some crap like that!” He rolled his eyes, folding his arms, and looked around to the demented creatures again, completely ignoring his face.

“Well, uh…Sonic. The condition is called bipolar disorder, and I’ve heard from the doctors back at Austin Lakes that you have quite a severe case. You stabbed a nurse with a needle in the middle of a manic, possibly psychotic episode. You were restrained and the doctors thought about sending you here. That sounds like you have extreme manic episodes, and maybe we can help you get your moods stabilized in here.”  
“Look buddy, the real reason I was in that hospital was because I wanted to get away from my family. My mother can be a bitch sometimes, and my father is harder than steel and will break you like a twig if you do anything he considers wrong in his eyes. He said once that I couldn’t get the job I wanted, like, an athlete or something, because I never worked hard enough. And he tells me I’m fine in my other job, which is working at the steel mill with him, but…”

“Okay Sonic I get your story,” he growled, like a dog defending his chew toy. “But the doctors found that you have a serious case of bipolar. And we want you to stay here and manage it until you can go back to work and go back to life with your family and friends. For now, you’ll be assessed by our doctors and staff for a total of a week, and maybe we can determine whether or not you need to stay for a total of six months or a year to be treated. So if you behave yourself for a week you may be able to get out of here. Is that understood, Sonic?”

Sonic was glancing at the pictures, not listening to the doctor. He wondered about these creatures. One of them looked like a bipedal elephant with a giraffe as a trunk, with flamingo wings that strutted out like long wires of thread, with a complete vacant grin on its face, like it was far away, like it was ignoring the death of so many people it possibly killed. He knew a word that described some of these creatures: a chimera. Nothing but a freakish mutation, of blending two or three animals together. But why have these pictures in the doctor’s office, when some of them actually looked deranged and psychotic, like the raven with muscular, human hands trying to knit its bloody heart back inside his chest, like he was some kind of cobbler? Did they have a schizophrenic patient they were proud of to showcase these drawings like awards?

“Are you listening to me Sonic?” he snarled again, gazing deeply into his eyes. “We will observe you for a week, and then we’ll see if you need to stay here or not. Are we clear?”  
Sonic gazed back into his, and they were brown. Sullen. It was strange observing them, especially when this equally as strange man who called himself a doctor looked so unprofessional and was getting angry at his remarks. But when he looked deep into them, they were caked and muddy; they looked soulless, like they were actually marbles, the same you would find in a taxidermy animal. This man looked to be absent, daydreaming, like he wasn’t really here or there, but somewhere in a land where all these monsters existed, where only fantasy thrived, and he wanted to live in it as long as he could, and savor it like wine. And when Sonic gazed further, he thought he was going to go to that world and give up reality too, like this man.

Maybe that was why it was called Wonderland he guessed. Because this man was the master of ceremonies, like the Mad Hatter organizing his chaotic tea party, but in this very reality, he really didn’t know what he was doing to help all these patients. They were all either Cheshire cats, smiling and laughing wickedly, or the lizards distraught over their broken everything, or the turtle who cried of everything, or…

Simply Alice’s, like himself, who couldn’t tell what this madness would bring.

“Like crystal, sir.” He thought he should be happy about possibly being released in a week, but maybe this week would simply be nothing but a Hell on Earth, much like Austin Lakes sometimes was, or maybe even worse, like this very man was simply the gatekeeper to Hell’s doors.  
But this only made him become curiouser and curiouser, as he was let out of the doctor’s office, escorted by a bright nurse who acted like this was his birthday, and into the ward.

And this Dr. Splinter continued to draw all these elaborate things, as if he was really undisturbed the whole time. Draw draw draw! Draw the creatures! Draw the fantasies! Draw everything your heart ever desired! Draw!

 

The nurse let him walk into the main wing of the hospital, where he met all the patients and saw what the ward looked like inside their doors.

He took a glimpse at one side, where there were other animals like him. Some were reading, some were gaping at the big-screened TV that had an old man rant about something the Democrats did and how they were ruining America, probably like some of the schizophrenic patients he might meet here. Hell, most people who ranted about the government constantly probably were schizophrenic. It reminded him of his father, and he wondered if there were other right-wingers like him, listening to this insane old man ramble about things he didn’t clearly have a grasp of. And these people were just as insane as he was, listening to them. He could only think of them as nothing but blind and crazy sheep, listening to this equally as crazy, equally as blind ram who was going to lead them all off a cliff, while Dr. Splinter was simply a sheepherder who had no use or didn’t even cared for all these sheep plunging to their deaths, to no longer become fleece but broken bones and stained hides. But he reassured him that when they died, they would be granted into heaven, to a perfect America. 

There was a purple weasel with an overgrown fang, whose golden eyes began to stare at him with bitterness, but also with a hint of curiosity. He was listening to the radio, constantly ignoring the other doctors and nurses and their conversations about the other patients. While a green duck and a colossal yellow polar bear took up most of the room on the couch, reading what appeared to be The Grapes of Wrath, as the duck pestered the other, asking him what the man was talking about on the screen. And he could only reply, “I don’t know.” 

Beside them were many tables scattered, with a screen window casted over a cafeteria. He assumed this was where they ate and did their group activities, as he watched a purple cat wearing a white gown talk to a pink hedgehog, wearing the same hospital attire. He noticed that the purple cat constantly ran her fingers over the torn and worn green leather seat and looked down, as if she had a dirty secret, and she was ashamed, as the pink hedgehog looked at her stomach, and wondered if it was skinny enough. At the corner was where many seats and magazines and books lied, and no one occupied them (“Not many people go there because it’s right next to the vent. It’s pretty cold,” the nurse explained.). And they had two long halls, one where the men slept and one for the women. But the hospital seemed to be overrun with only men, maybe some of the women were hiding in their rooms. Maybe there was one sleeping, crying, in rage, or an action his father would give him a half hour long speech if he even thought about it, masturbating. And he could hear his voice now, pulling him away and smacking his hand and telling him why it was wrong. We’re Catholics, son.

The walls’ only color was nothing but a deep emerald dark green, while in the halls a border struck through and had a splash of white. It seemed to be the hospitals’ color code: dark green and white, and the doors were like spectrums of forgotten colors that no one bothered to color anything with in artworks and even in children’s coloring books. The code was that they were sick, forgotten, lost children that they had to guide again, and doing what these nurses said was going to lead them into the bright welcoming land of purgatory.

And he thought staring at all this green was going to make him sick.

“Now let’s show you to your room: Room B86,” the nurse declared proudly. As they walked down the halls, he watched as these paintings rolled on by, and he was disappointed to not see anything made by an inspired, but lunatic artist. They were only colorful and boring splotches of paint, like something that Jackson Pollock would make. And why? These paintings were very dull, nothing that would calm anyone or inspire anyone to get better. This was from an artist who was very sane, but crazy enough to make shitty art that anyone could do with their ass. And people were even crazier to pay him for his work and to frame it up in this insane asylum.

“Here we are, Sonic!” He felt disappointed with how shabby his room looked. Although the white wooden drawer looked like a prized antique with its swirled handles and lion claws holding it up at the bottom with little effort, it was scratched up and it looked tattered by cemented gum and people scratching in their names and their tentative loves in here. Gerald + Polly. He was sure that romance lasted forever, for as long as he was going to stay in this hospital. The mirror looked dirty with a few white streaks of either scars or toothpaste that no one bothered to clean (And the janitor’s only job was to clean and mock the patients apparently. Maybe the patients were so crazy, that the only thing the janitor could do was mock.), his shower was in a concrete room with only a thin sheet that didn’t allow him much privacy, and the toilet’s body seemed to be held down by zipper wires, as if anyone was going to suddenly throw or destroy it. And he was surrounded by that hideous dark green paint again, by the beds that were only bare hospital mattresses. He learned that he had a roommate, a red dreadlocked creature who still faced the wall on his bed, asleep.

“This is your roommate, Knuckles. He’s still sleeping, but it’s his choice to not want to participate in anything right now. Right now it’s free time, which is where the patients are allowed to watch TV, or talk, or well, sleep. Remember Sonic, for a week we’ll have to observe you, and then we’ll decide whether or not you have to stay in here since you, after all, claim you don’t belong in here. So try to be on your best behavior for a week, and maybe you get to be released! Wouldn’t that be great? You wouldn’t be stuck in a hospital that could keep you in here for years, would you?”

He eyed Knuckles, seeing the many holes in the wall the hospital didn’t seem to afford to cover up. Or the janitors or anyone else were too busy mocking the patients to want to even bother. “How long has he been in here? What’s his problem?”

“I’m sorry Sonic, but I’m afraid that’s confidential,” she said with a frown. “But Knuckles has been in here for about a year, and I heard he has a wife and child. But he just doesn’t seem to want to cooperate.”

What a terrific sign. Someone who even has a wife and kid can’t even go back to his life for a year because they kept him in here for some bullshit reason. And he conjectured about what would possibly happen to him. I have parents who would surely want me back home, a job that my dad never has me late for in my life, and I was going to go to high school as a senior…I can’t be here for a year! God no! I have too much in my life that I’ll miss simply because I wanted to take a week long vacation! And how is insurance going to handle me being in here for a year! Jesus Christ!

He thought it was his own father telling him not to take the “lord’s name in vain”, when it was only the nurse. “Are you all right, Sonic? Do you want to lie down for a while before you meet your doctor, Dr. Robotnik?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Sure,” he could answer back, as he held his head, trying to hold all this information and the shock inside, his pupils dwindling. “I’ll just rest a while, and I’ll go to his office. Nothing to it.”

The nurse shut the door as the white sun’s fingers poked through the window, but they couldn’t even stir Knuckles awake. But they continued to prod Sonic’s eyes as he gazed at the ceiling, trying to put all these things in his head, all these things that demanded him to put in order so he could digest it slowly, like a ruminating cow.

He couldn’t. All this information was nothing but a bullet train to him, running a million miles an hour, across the tracks, nothing but a silver blur that couldn’t be captured by anything in the world, and it was about to collide with a solid brick wall, and everything would fall apart, in a disassembled and tragic mess. And there would be blood. Blood everywhere. Thousands killed. Thousands of information lost. Thousands of brain cell wires running loose and sending in too much, and only returning with so little, so much electricity, so much hurt, so much pain.

And he held his hurting head and began to cry, as he realized this was now only a downward spiral, to a black pit of the earth that no longer recognized what he was or what his name was and everyone would forget about him. He was going to be stuck here no matter what anyone thought about him. His parents would forget and give up on him. He was going to be exactly like Knuckles, having an episode every day and the nurses only regarded it as merely “not cooperating”, when he was possibly enraged that he was stuck here, not with his child, not with his wife, and he missed out on a year’s worth of living being stuck in this hellhole. 

He was usually so well put-together. But not today. He broke apart today. He was nothing but pieces. Once a tall, proud statue, now nothing but dust and rocks, and the nurses and doctors were simply going to clean it up and pretend he was never really there. He was lower than a hedgehog that once had a life and lived in Austin in Texas. 

He was a patient.

He was actually nothing. He was actually lower than a measly worm digging and shitting through the dirt.

And he finally realized why people would actually attempt to kill themselves here. Because these hospitals were nothing but the layers of Hell itself. Satan was the head nurse, while all the damned souls tried to pass the time by playing card games and watching religious programming and that crazy old man, but Satan tortured them by making them take pills and lose all sense of their identity, taking their souls. And he never thought of what Hell was really like when his father would warn him about it, but he could say to his father in a few years, “I was actually in Hell, and Satan was a real bitch.”

So he broke, and sobbed.

 

“Dr. Splinter.”  
“Yes?” He was interrupted from drawing again. What the hell did this wench have to say now?  
“Dr. Robotnik wanted to see you for a moment.”  
He breathed out an embittered sigh. “Send him in.”  
He watched as a round, obese man with a thick, bushy mustache wearing a doctor’s lab coat entered through his door, his face resembling some worry. And he never felt worried about anything in this hospital for as long as he could remember. “Dr. Splinter, I can’t help but feel like we might’ve made a critical error for this one.”

“What is it?”  
“It’s that blue hedgehog you admitted in here today. Sonic. I don’t know why, but I feel like…he might have some inkling, some sort of…ability…You said he was bipolar, right? That he may assist us greatly in building up?”  
“Yes. He will do a great service in keeping my world alive. You’re saying he might…destroy it?”  
He frowned. “Maybe. But we can’t be too sure, but it would be a wise idea to really monitor him. To see what he’s capable of. If it all goes to hell, we can give him shock therapy. Even lobotomize him if we have to. I know how important it is to keep this world of yours alive. But I say we only do this in the most severe of cases. Because if he’s a brain dead moron he would only be our responsibility and he wouldn’t be able to assist us at all. And if we kill him and if the other nurses and doctors find out we were the ones who injected him with something…”  
“So what do you suppose we really do with this Sonic fellow?”  
He strained his face, as if he tried hard to think of a solution. “Make sure he doesn’t know anything of our operations. He must be unassuming while we give him access to things like being able to go out once in a while and once in a while breaking him down. You know, so the world can really become alive.”

“Is that so?” he said, amused. “I can feel it now. He seems to be really depressed about something. Depression creates some of the most beautiful things sometimes. And while these patients continue to be depressed, I can have this beautiful world while they continue to stay here. It’s imperative that no one knows of our plans, and if everything goes well, I’ll give you a piece of it so you can build your empire. But make sure this Sonic fellow doesn’t do anything too drastic, or figure out everything. But if he does, we must make sure he doesn’t become a nuisance, like some of the goddamn vegetables we have here.”  
“I understand, sir. I’ll make sure everything goes smoothly.”  
“Good. Now leave me alone for a while. I have to create too you know. Building a fantastic world such as this isn’t easy.”

He shut the door behind him.

He hated Dr. Splinter. Such a smug, conceited bastard who always thought everything he created was such a work of art, and it was usually all he wanted to talk about. He thought he would never work for asses like him, especially when he knew he was the brains behind Wonderland. He was the one who made the operations run. He only created things. He was the embroider when he knew the design of the fabric, putting the seams together in this world, and what would work. Such a useless peon.

But he would imagine his golden, gleaming empire, once a mere fantasy, but soon it would turn real, and he could change the world. No longer under rule with these right-winged paranoid nuts. He would make everyone sane under his rule. His doctorate degree would actually make sense to him then.

And the thought that he would be the one who would tell them to stay in this god-awful hospital like a prison, even that ghastly Dr. Splinter, made him smile, and he told himself that soon these endeavors would bear delicious fruit. He just had to be a good, patient farmer, waiting for when the rainstorm came. The rain that would drown out all his miseries.

He walked down the hall, fumbled through his keys, and looked through Sonic’s chart. It was time to play the role of the caring doctor for a little bit, for such a measly little worm that had no use in this world.


	3. J.D. Salinger is the Real White Rabbit

His vision was blurred when he woke up, eventually clearing until he could see the great starry sky with colorful swirls, looking like great big finger spun twines of ice, glowing radiantly in a cerulean bloom that shined on his face. It was nearly bluer than himself.

His senses came to him in an instant, as if a great crash of touch, smells, and sounds happened in his body, as he analyzed the world around him. His hands felt something that he knew was not like a hospital bed, the thin sheets that barely comforted him from the frigid room. It felt hard, but if he stuck his fingers in there deep enough it gathered in his hands, making them dirty and gray. He smelled something that he distinctly remembered as the smell of an open stream, smells that he only knew when he was out in the country, out in the nature around Texas. It was always so stifling hot. Whenever he smelled the scent of running water, he would always run until the smell became so strong and he would see the rivers, a white cascade of waterfalls like a rippling of a white evening dress that he would cup all the water in his hands and dampen himself against the sun that so wanted to dry him to a crisp. He knew most of Texas was acres and acres of ranches, so finding a forest like this was rare, as his father took him there before when he was a few years younger. The air around him was cold, stifling with the vivacity of night, and he could hear the tittering of crickets in the distance, and the hooting of owls that wished to make themselves known to the great yellow moon that characterized this sky, with the swirls of blue and the stars riding along as they flew across the night.

He was in a forest he soon learned, in a land that he knew looked like a famous Van Gogh painting, A Starry Night. The forest’s green leaves were outlined by thick black paint strokes, the trees looking curvy and bendy and elastic like rubber as they stretched out across the sky, as they veined the heart of the moon. He was awakened by the chilly evening, as a river beside him ran along the banks like many strokes of white and gray oil paints. The smell of the stream he could nearly taste in his mouth, a cold metallic taste. There were opaque dashes across it as the moon glittered above, with his reflection so smeared he was looking at a blurry portrait of himself. 

The land was strange, something he thought he never saw before, but it all felt so familiar to him, like an old childhood home he could faintly remember in photographs.

The wind blew across his cotton gown, rippling like waves as he walked across this forest, this live painting, that when the trees swayed in the wind they seemed like nothing but a lazy animation. The world turned dark as the forest began to hold him in its grasp, the trees surrounding him and blocking against the moon’s rays, the beatings of the white heart. It felt so surreal to be walking in a land he knew he never been in, but he felt he belonged here, that this land was real, and it welcomed him. The silhouettes of the leaves blackened the ground, seeing nothing but darkness that had nothing, just the pit of his soul, the place where all dark emotions lied and where derelict thoughts licked his feet. No leaves, no roots, no plants, just a dark earth that made him like he was walking on a void, to the ends of space.

He reached out to touch the trees, and while he felt the night breeze, he could not feel the rough wood and the fuzzy fabric of the leaves. It felt like nothing, as if he touched something translucent in material, like he was touching only air. This land seemed to be so much stranger to him, as he once thought his senses were working properly. But when he walked through these woods, the thought that this was possibly a dream never went across his mind, as if it really was a dream itself. He didn’t even know who he was, what his name was, his past life, except when he smelled the streams and he had the memory of his father taking him out to the country. The only things that popped in his mind about his personality were these things he felt that would suddenly trigger some memory he wasn’t sure would apply to him. He had no distinguishing characteristics, it never appeared in his empty void of a mind. It was nothing but a hallucinogenic that he had no control of, as he could only watch as he left the woods after he seemed to have forgotten about the water and the black ground, and he was near a bridge that stretched across a river, with the city lights reflecting on the painted surface like golden eyes of a cat that was sitting patiently, waiting for him to make a move.

He knew there was something in this city he was after. Something that would fulfill his dreams, tell him who he really was, fill his head with memories, learn what this land was, everything that he truly desired. And that he had to get to this city, even if his head filled about a notion that this city in the distance had some kind of dark secret, that it was hiding out in that very distance because they didn’t want him here. He was a threat to their very existence, and to know about this city would only bring their civilization to a downfall.

As he walked on the metallic bridge, passing by a park bench that looked lonely, a miserable inanimate being with no one sitting on it, and a rusted old bicycle that felt abandoned (yet another miserable inanimate object), his senses began to fill with a stillness, a fear that crept on his heart as it began to beat faster (thump thump thump). He wasn’t sure why the park bench and the rusted bicycle instilled it, but there was something mysterious about it, as no one walked across this world but him, and there was a shadowy figure in the horizon, stomping out a cigarette after taking his last fill of nicotine.

He was gazing at the stream, a black hedgehog with a tuft of white fur on his chest with red marks on his quills that glowed in the night, burning scars that screamed out to him to be afraid. His eyes were blood red, the color of death when it came to a virgin in a Middle Ages painting, and when they stopped to look at him, his heart pounded faster (thump thump thump thump thump).

“Who are you?” Sonic asked, stopping in his tracks. “Why are you here? You can’t be here. Everyone is forbidden here, you know that.”

The words seemed to spill out of his mouth with very little control. He was watching a movie, some kind of strange horror film that made his heart continue to pump faster. (Thump thump thump thump thump).

His face was transfixed in a sneer as he examined everything, he was even examining deep in his soul. “You don’t need to know my name, Phony. I can go wherever I like in this world. It’s you who shouldn’t be here.”  
“Wh-what did you call me?” Phony?   
An artificial person?  
Why was he calling them, when he knew exactly that he was made of blood and flesh, when this creature that was asking him this question seemed to be made with dreams and ire, that he was born, and this creature that was gazing at him wasn’t. He was, above all else, a monster made from the dark pit of his unconscious, the dark pit of his dreams, in the same place as the dark pit of his soul and the derelict dreams.  
“I called you a phony,” he stated matter-of-factly. “Faker, liar, fraud, scammer, pseudo. You don’t know what that means? Sometimes I would think I would pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes, so I wouldn’t have goddamn useless conversations with people like you. I would just go on with my life, talking to you via a piece of paper, hell, I might as well have my tongue become a piece of paper for all I know. You don’t belong here. I don’t know how you even came here. I doubt when you wake up you would lose all traces of memories about this place. Do me a favor Phony, and never come back here again. I can’t deal with this at all. With your cotton gown that makes you look like a bozo and having your mind so empty like you’re a goddam idiot or something. Looks like I’m going to have to kill you. It’s been fun, Phony, it really has been fun, but this is my job, and sometimes you have to do things you aren’t going to like and be proud of when you’re done with them. And let’s hope I never meet another goddam fool like you. I had enough of fools in my life. My life had nothing but bozos and fools and phonies in it, and I don’t need a single goddam more.”

Sonic anticipated the blow, as his hands and feet were suddenly frozen, as anti-freeze replaced his bones, and he thought even when he continued to stare at Shadow with his eyes that jabbed at him and poked at him that he couldn’t breathe, as if they had hands, and they were crushing him slowly, until they crushed even his antifreeze bones and they would crush his soul.

The demonic hedgehog pushed him off the bridge, with gloved hands and not demonic hands and demonic claws, but with regular gloved hands like his, and he plunged deep into the frigid water, feeling his bones now turning from antifreeze to sudden pure ice. His world was now completely blue, a deep lurid blue, a deep black blue then he could feel his soul, his being, disappear from that water completely, and he wondered if he was dead, or he just seemed to wake up, as his eyes were plucked open, the green eyes that grew from their shut lids and looked around the ward around him.   
His sheets were mangled, much like his hands were claws and he nearly tore them into two, and he saw the bile green walls that mocked him every time his eyes scratched their paint. He knew he would probably have to get used to waking up to see that sickening color. Usually when he dreamed he would be in a daze, sometimes wondering if the dream was real for a few minutes before going back to his ordinary life (that was no longer so ordinary for being stuck in a place such as this), but this was something he couldn’t ignore. A hedgehog that wore the blood of virgins on his head and claimed he was artificial and that he didn’t belong in that secret world that only required a secret key, or a secret password, to pass through.

As he rubbed his eyes, muttering, as the daylight shone on his quills, he thought on how this dream was too different from the other dreams he had, and he could never remember most of them. This one, however, all the details were vivid, as if he was there, as if he could feel the trees and feel the wind that blew against him as he walked in those woods. And that hedgehog…he wasn’t sure what he meant. He murdered him in the dream, but he kept mentioning that he didn’t belong in this place. Belong in what? Belong in a world that was made from the artist’s delirium, brush strokes of madness and pain and fear? He wasn’t even completely firm of where he was or how he stumbled upon that land, the land where the streams were oil and the leaves were acrylic and the night sky was watercolors.

A strange thought appeared in his head, one that he felt he couldn’t completely deny, as maybe it made sense to him now. He could’ve probably called it a “delusion”, but he wasn’t going to have these people think he was a schizophrenic crazy who needed to be locked up in the worst ward he heard from the mumblings of the nurses, the Disturbed Ward. He thought only the purest of mad hatters got to be in there, with their mad struck out eyes, and their struck out lips, and their fingers that danced or stood still to the symphonies that clashed and clunked in their heads.

Maybe there was a world in here. A world where this doctor invented, as shown by all those lunatic drawings, that were fueled by all these patients’ maddening thoughts and sorrows and joys. And this hedgehog was supposed to be the guardian of this world. And he somehow entered that world. By sleeping. He wasn’t sure of why he thought this up, but he felt he needed very little sleep again and his thoughts seemed to run together, like bleeding colors in a painting, a painting by a man with a mercurial hat and a mercurial mind. They could call him manic if they wanted to. How they seemed to want to put a label on everyone here made his mind turn into a deep bleeding red, red the color of pain and anger and passion and fire and blood. He was a hedgehog. Not something they could give him some kind of mark, like a brand name, and put him on a shelf until they needed him and they could drill into his mind that he was a name brand, not his real name. The doctors wanted to control him. If he let them get into their game, they would keep him here as long as they wanted him here, and he would lose all sense of identity and his life. Like that knucklehead who was gone now, probably out to breakfast since there was some faint light out. The morning glow was streaked by a black tree branch that stretched out in the window like veins, and it quivered by the wind, as cold blood of the sun streamed down it. 

He looked outside. It was still a beautiful summer out there in Texas. Wonderland had many flowers on the outside of it, coating the whole field with daffodils and bluebells. The grass was still quite green, and he could see out in the distance weeping willows that closed the hospital away from visitors or people who wanted to look at the freaks who lived here. He guessed that was all well and good. He didn’t want people to look at their private lives. But he knew that these trees were hiding something. They seemed to be so well-placed…  
He realized the hospital didn’t have fences here either, blocking them from the outside. If he somehow could get past security and all these locked doors, he could run out here, free, into the sweltering heat and into his actual life. 

And he could break this window. Maybe it wasn’t Plexiglas. Maybe they were all tricking the patients here. Maybe this wasn’t actually a well-secured hospital. Maybe that was all a lie.

He looked for something to throw against the window. He would break it, he would break the veins of the glass and pull apart the veins of the bars and he would escape and he would run and he would try to reach the sun at the end of the land and he would be free, free as a goddamned bird! Free as far as the light could reach his eye, he would be free and he would start a new life, as a sailor from Chicago named Pete Mallary, who would travel the world and see the stars like a silhouetted canvas, see the stars as they would stab through the night and make the sky bleed a little whiteness, and he would see the many cultures, the many brilliances of the Earth, and he would be free. Finally free. No longer living in this putrid place of a hospital. Free. That was the keyword.

I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Phony. It may not seem like it, but that really is Plexiglas. Besides, what are you going to do when you run and make your new life? They can just get the police on you you know. You can run as fast as you can out there, Phony, but they’ll still get you.

That voice. That voice he heard in his dream. He was hearing it in his head now. And that unmistakable name he called him. “Phony”. The artificial hedgehog. This other hedgehog he saw…he was inside his head now. Ready to make statements that would mock his asinine decisions.

“Who are you? Why are you in my head now? I saw you in my dream, but now…” His voice quivered. He had to admit, he was afraid, as this hedgehog continued to boom in his head.

Yeah, and I had to kill you so you didn’t had to travel in that world. You got one thing right bozo, and that there’s a world out here. A world that you would never be able to understand. There’s something about you that keeps taking you to this world though. I don’t know why, maybe you’re some kind of chosen one or something. Not that it matters anyways, because you would get killed here. Killed like cows in a slaughterhouse. Learn any more about this world and you’re dead, got it? I’m saying that for your safety, you know.

Another world? A world outside of the hospital? Was the world really split in two halves for the patients: fantasy and reality? Has Sonic really broke the barrier and entered their fantasies, their dreams?  
He seemed to be right, even if this was a delusion of his. But maybe he wasn’t gripping so tightly on reality. Delusions, a voice in his head…he couldn’t tell the doctor any of this. They would keep him in here for a long, long time in the Disturbed Ward. He had to try to act normal, no matter what. Even smile a big wide grin for all the world to see. Because this world seemed to be as blind as him.

“Hello Sonic,” a lively nurse said, smiling. “Dr. Robotnik is waiting for you in the second door to the right. And then you can continue to eat breakfast with the others. It’ll be quick, so don’t worry.”

It’ll be quick, he kept telling himself as he walked to the doctor’s door. This better be quick, because I’m starving. They better have some good food here.

It was strange to him on how the door was marked. It was a dark glaze of blue, like him, and striped. And the window was blurry, as if they didn’t want you to see the patient or the doctor at all, only in smudges. Not the usual wired design just to remind you that you were stuck here and you were in some kind of prison.

He walked in, realizing how small the room was, as the doctor was nearly bigger than it itself, and he was egg-shaped like Humpty Dumpty. He was hunched over in his chair, writing something down in that ineligible handwriting doctors always had. And he greeted him not with a smile, but a look that just seemed to show him how tired he was and that he shouldn’t waste his time with such nonsense that he was probably going to spout out of his mouth like some kind of fountain of craziness. “Hello Sonic. Come in.”

There was only a very small table that might as well have been a child play set table, complete with the plastic tea cups and plastic kitchen with the plastic food, and he realized when he sat in this chair he seemed to be getting smaller as if he was regressing into a child, as this doctor somehow grew larger, towering over him in this very small room with the checkerboard floor. The floor itself even looked like an optical illusion once Sonic stared at it long enough, looking like a zigzag of shapes and the splatters of the blood of the mind of the insane, until the doctor commanded him to pay attention.

“Sonic, what is the reason you’re in this very hospital?” He couldn’t help but imagine him grinning with sharp teeth and a tongue that licked his lips, as if he was going to cook this hedgehog over that plastic kitchen set and chop him up with a plastic knife and fork and eat him and swallow him whole like some kind of depraved snake that lost its arms and legs and it crawled on its belly from God when he told Eve to bite in that apple, and he liked it.

“Well…I’m in here because of a mistake. I was admitted in Austin Lakes because I wanted to escape from my mom and dad. Y’know, a little vacation, right? And all of a sudden they accused me of stabbing a nurse with a needle or somethin’, and I’m stuck in here! I’m not crazy! I’ll show you in a week or so, I don’t need to be here! Right?”

He imagined himself getting smaller, the door behind his back becoming so little that he couldn’t even escape from this madman who wanted to slaughter him like the fresh sack of meat he was.   
“Right. And we’ll just wait what happens in a week and you’ll be out of here in no time. Try to be on your best behavior and we’ll see if you need to be in here. But it sounds like what you did was quite serious.”  
“I didn’t do it, okay! I don’t know who did it, but I know I didn’t do it! They wanted me to be locked up in here!”  
“Then how can you explain the blood on your shoes? And you said you did it earlier. That’s what the records in Austin Lakes said.”

He remembered that they still didn’t clean his shoes of the black stains. They never asked for his shoes. They wanted him to keep wearing these shoes just to show how crazy he really was to everyone. A scarlet stain for him to wear so everyone knew his crime, that he nearly committed murder.

“Shit,” he muttered.

The doctor said nothing, only marking it in his chart that he could see had his name in big letters: SONIC. Ever since he was in Austin Lakes he always wanted to read what they said about him, and he wondered what this doctor was writing in the chart, maybe something that meant to the others, “Slaughter him, because he looks delicious! I can’t wait to glaze his meat with barbecue sauce!”

Maybe it was just paranoia, the knife in the mind that made you think everyone else put that same knife while your back was turned. Maybe he was just imagining it. Because the doctor let him go. He was the same size as he was when he entered the door, the door was the same size, and Humpty Dumpty was the same size. But the floor still looked like some kind of optical illusion, as the black and white created some kind of horrid shapes as he left. Images of wicked grins, wicked eyes, and wicked fingers pointing at him. He thought he could see the doctor smile at him too as he left.

He wasn’t sure why this door was blue and striped. Or why the walls were dark green and white. And the floor sometimes swirled around him and continued onward to the vastness of time. This place was all seemingly designed by a madman himself, while he kept a bunch of madmen in some kind of crazy cage. He saw the others in the main room with their breakfasts, while the staff talked to them and did some kind of check on each one. He felt frigid again as they turned on the air conditioner, as if they were trying to keep their slabs of meat refrigerated. He was too hungry to even consider putting on his sweatshirt. He left the hallway, once in a while gazing at the striped blue door, thinking that maybe, this hospital was color coded, or it was simply designed by some kind of lunatic artist that was secretly trying to make a statement. 

He met all of the patients when he got his meal. He was given some cereal, orange juice, and some mauve paste that someone dared to call oatmeal. They gave him some syrup and sweetener to make it better, but it still tasted disgusting even when he tried all those things. He was disappointed that their food wasn’t so great. At least, not their breakfasts. Breakfast was his favorite meal of the day and the only thing he could swallow was the cereal. Even the orange juice had some kind of weird aftertaste to it. Bland, and most likely wasn’t made from oranges, but orange powder that wasn’t as nutritional as actual oranges. And then he thought when he got out of this hospital, he would sue it for everything it had, claiming that they weren’t giving the patients the proper nutrients they needed.

They were all eating the same thing, and most of them avoided the oatmeal, except the purple weasel who didn’t mind it at all, as if he tasted worse things in his life. The only new patient he saw in this ward was a white bat wearing a thick sweatshirt to shield herself from the cold, still wearing her eye shadow even if it wasn’t allowed in the hospital (which meant if she was in here for a while she probably didn’t shower in all this time, as he noticed no one sat by her). Her aqua eyes seemed transfixed on everyone, especially him as he sat down and prodded his oatmeal. It was so odd to have her stare at him as he ate his breakfast. He kept looking back to see if she was still gazing at him with a stupefied look on her face, expecting something in return for being alive.

“Hey. Dude. Hey. You’re probably new here, huh? Are you dude? Are you?”

He turned his back to the gazing bat, to see a green duck, seeming to bounce up and down on his chair and his fingers twitching and moving constantly and rapidly, talking to him. He was with the polar bear, who was looking at him as well, but only for a few moments as he went back to his breakfast and playing with the gruel.

He thought this duck must’ve had serious ADD to jitter and bounce so much. He asked again, “You’re new here, huh dude? You’re new, right?”  
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess you can say I’m new.”

He swiftly looked back to the bat then back to him in such a quick motion he nearly couldn’t catch it.   
“Well, don’t talk to her, okay? She has serious attention problems, y’know? She’s an attention whore, you can say. One time, she wanted me to have sex with her or something. She asks all the guys that! Ugh! So what’s your name, dude? Do you have a name huh huh dude?”  
Sonic thought he was going to laugh at how hyperactive this duck seemed to be, but he might really had ADD and that would’ve made him seem insensitive. “I’m Sonic. Sonic the hedgehog. And you are?”  
“I’m Bean, and this is my buddy here, Bark.” Bark lifted his hand for a few seconds, giving a signal that he was here, before swishing his oatmeal back and forth. “He doesn’t talk very much. He never has since he’s been here. Whaddya in here for huh huh whaddya in here for?”

He wanted to know why he was admitted in the hospital like an excited child awaiting a present on Christmas morning. “They said I might have bipolar or something and I got stuck here. That’s it. Nothing special.”  
“Oh really?” he said, interested. “Well, I’m in here because I nearly burned…down a forest. I can’t help it man. I love…fire. How it glows. How pretty it looks. Sometimes I have dreams where I just want to watch the whole world burn, you know? It’s so pretty, to see all those things burn in a fire. How black they are, how they contort…”

He thought of how unlucky his roommate was, because he probably pissed the bed every night, like any other pyromaniac.

Bean was quiet as the staff told everyone that breakfast was over and that it was now time for group. Sonic saw how much of that oatmeal was wasted, as no one ate it except that purple weasel, whose golden eyes glared at him as they left the center room and into the next. The door was painted yet another odd color. Purple, like the weasel who always seemed to be on the verge of laughing maniacally. He wondered about the colors for these doors. Even the doors where they left the ward were colored a bright yellow that he thought he would only see in Easter. It didn’t match with all this dark green. There was also a bright green door, an orange, a pink, a multitude of colors, from an artist’s mad plethora of colors inside his manic mind.  
Maybe he was right with all the color coding. Maybe each door meant something to the people who worked here.

There was a red door near the group room. The window was hugged with black wires, and there were three black doors, two to the side, and one that he could plainly see in the front. It was marked SAFETY ROOM, and the black door he saw beyond it, that had large yellow letters inscribed, CHRONICS WARD, DO NOT ENTER UNLESS YOU HAVE PERMISSION OF STAFF.

Chronics? He guessed there was a rank in this ward too. There were these people, him, who have probably been in here for about a year maybe, and then these degenerates, who might’ve been here for all their life to be considered as that, and they had no access to the outside world at all, as if they were undeserving.

He thought of such a fate. To be considered so mentally ill you could never see the outside ever again. To be locked away from your family and friends for as long as many years. He couldn’t imagine it no matter how he strained his brain, and even if he didn’t know who all those people in that section of the ward that would be considered as “chronics,” he felt sympathetic towards them. They might as well be considered dead to the world, to be locked up in here for such a long time that no one even knew they were gone, as if they fell off the face of the Earth. He couldn’t be in this hospital for this long, to be called dead and to be a product to the whole ward. He had too much of a life to get to, and he might as well have killed himself if he was stuck in this prison for eons.

Yet, he wanted to take a gander in that ward, to see who all those people were that inhabited it, and hug them, even let them escape, because to just be in here for that long was nothing short but brutal torture.  
He was jerked away from his thoughts as the woman, dressed in white hospital garb and a dark green shirt whom he saw earlier at breakfast, was beginning to lead the group session.

“Hello all of you. I’m Tabitha, and I will be trying to help you and getting to know why all of you are in this hospital today and what your goals are. For your information, we have this group every day and every night, to see how all of you are doing to keep yourselves healthy and mentally fit. And if you follow these goals to a tee, you might even get out of here, and that’s something you all probably think of every day in this hospital. But many of you have been in here even longer than a year, and that really upsets me. Amy, you’ve been in here for the longest, correct?”  
She nodded, her green eyes hidden from the group, looking as if she was ready to sob underneath her small faded crescent of a mouth.  
“And…you said your boyfriend broke up with you because you’ve been in here for two years, is that correct?”  
“Yes. Just recently,” she replied softly.  
“This is unfortunate, Amy. Your boyfriend should be with you even if you’ve been in here for a long time, because that’s what couples usually do, but you can’t let that distract you from your recovery…”  
“I’ve been in here longer than anyone else here. Why would you say there would be any recovery here? Nothing has changed…”  
“Amy, if you show no signs of progress for quite a long time, you may be moved up to the Chronics Ward. And…it’s not exactly a good place to be.”

This girl, who looked like she barely came out of high school, was going to be shut away from the world and stuck in a high security prison for all of her life. Sonic knew just then he had to act. This poor girl shouldn’t be trapped in that Godforsaken ward, with the other victims who were so unfortunate to be considered nearly criminally insane. She possibly had a life too, if she once had a boyfriend, two years ago.

“I don’t know what’s going on in that ward, but don’t you think that’s a little harsh? To send that girl to a place where there aren’t even any windows and you can’t even go outside and no one can visit you for years, not even your family? That’s what it seems to be like. For God’s sake…”  
He stopped speaking from Tabitha raising her hand. “That’s hospital protocol, Sonic, even if I don’t know exactly what that ward is like. Dr. Splinter and Dr. Robotnik try to help those patients in there, because they really are seriously mentally ill, but they seem to keep refusing the help…and that’s why they’re admitted. And Amy may also be the same unless she lets them help her.”  
“So you don’t know what’s going on in there, and you’re a staff member? The hell is this? If I were you, I wouldn’t even trust those freaks!”  
His voice grew louder, bolder. And his mind grew redder.  
“Now Sonic…they’re the head doctor and…”  
His head began to pound and throb, as he couldn’t contain all these thoughts, all these demons that crawled and scratched in his brain. His head was now the color of blood. “I don’t give a damn if they’re the head! They might as well be my ass! I’m not going to let them torture that poor girl! Fuck them!”

He was jumping out of his seat now, the chair falling with a loud resonating thud that echoed in the room. Everyone gazed at him, and he expected laughter slipping from their mouths like dribble, and he thought he couldn’t stand to be here any longer. God be damned, he might as well die. He might as well spread his blood everywhere, make himself into ashes, make everyone realize that it was a grave mistake to be laughing at him like this.

His arms stretched to the shelf and he knew just then he had to grab something, which he soon found was something made of glass, like a small paperweight, as he hurled it down on the floor. The shattering pieces scattered like an egg, all the patients’ reflections being casted like small mirrors. He was disgusted by his face on the slit of glass, looking to be so dead and something that he knew wasn’t like him anymore, like some kind of beast that no longer even had a name. A branded cow that the hospital labeled him as.

The hospital is making me this way, he thought. I cannot stand to be a goddamn phony that this hospital seems to think is such a good thing to be. I might as well be dead than to be the person I think I am.

His thoughts were running together again, running and blending in such maddening colors, in colors that no longer made sense. The purple and the blue were now becoming red, as red as his blood that was now on the floor that was streaming so quick from his wrist. His blood scattered, the bright red clashing with the brown tiled floors and the dark green walls. Enough with the damn colors! Let them all drown me away into darkness! 

Hey. Phony. What are you, emo or something? Don’t waste your time doing this. They’ll get you. They’ll come get you and put you in restraints. How about you listen to me instead of these crazy thoughts in your head? 

As he was pinned against the wall, his wrists feeling the steel chains of tourniquets, seeing the hospital staff’s brown calm eyes that stared deep into his soul, deep into the madness and sorrow, deep into the pain and the confusion, and they tried to pry them out, as they injected him with what felt like Thorazine streaming from his ass into his veins, he could feel peace. He could feel hope. He could feel serenity. And he dropped to the floor, his wrists no longer streaming the deep corroded vat of blood that his mind’s colors used to been.

Look at the blood how pretty it shines ain’t it beautiful I won’t be like those degenerates I’m not a deaf-mute that refuses to speak that the hospital decides to imprison here I am who I am who I am who I am may the gods strike me down as I am here in the heavens and I loudly proclaim as I sacrifice my blood to the beasts I am who I am who I am who I am.

He saw that same doctor that grinned at him before he was tumbled away into Morpheus’ land, waiting for his slaughter as he was put into an all white room again, and he could only think he might as well have been as good as dead. And at once, as if that angel was caressing him again, his mind ceased, and he let it all blanket him as he fell soundlessly asleep, his mind ceasing to be insane.

The mercury stopped dripping into his brain from the hat he was wearing.

Patient Name: Sonic  
Species: Hedgehog

Analysis: Sonic seems to go into an emotional meltdown with little to no provocation. He suddenly stated that the head doctors, Dr. Splinter and Dr. Robotnik, “didn’t know their head from their ass”, and smashed a paperweight on the floor before picking up one of the pieces and slashing his wrists. I am not completely sure what caused him to suddenly become suicidal. Making a statement? Do his moods change so violently that he becomes suicidal? Whatever it is, he needs to be here for a long time until we can adjust his medication. Whatever it takes.

Diagnosis: Bipolar I Disorder (Severe)  
Length of Stay: 1+ year  
Signed by Tabitha Yales  
Notes from Dr. Splinter (written after the analysis):

HE KNOWS SOMETHING. I CAN HEAR IT IN HIS HEAD. HE MIGHT FIND OUT ABOUT MY WORLD. IF I HAVE TO LOCK HIM AWAY OR STAB HIS BRAIN I MIGHT AS WELL.


	4. Amy's Story; the Truth Behind Wonderland

All she had to do was ignite that spark. All she had to do was strike that match, and she would be the Flaming Woman, the Pretty Girl on Fire, the Burning Scarecrow. She would think of her demise in all her daydreams. Jumping from the bridge, plunging into the deep, green seaglass dark water, until she gave out her last breath, and she would sleep in the river for all of eternity. Slashing her wrists until her tub was nothing but a bath of deep, dark red blood, and she would sleep in the tepid water and have all of her life sucked out of her. And her favorite suicide? Was being a flaming, flashing star, so she could show everyone on how maddening her life was, and that she only wished to burn out, and fade away like ashes. Ash to ash. Dust to dust. That was all she was. A pile of burnt ashes, to be put away in a vase, to be talked about from her family and friends, on how sorry they were to treat her this way. The clock would sound with a resonating ring throughout the hallways, and her parents would mourn her death, everyday. She would be on top of the fireplace, and they would be reminded on how she died, how she went out, like an exploding star.

If people looked at her life, they would say she was privileged and she had nothing to “whine” about. Her family was very rich. It was her father that brought home the money. She actually wasn’t so sure on what he did that brought the money, for all she knew he could’ve been a major kingpin for cocaine, but she appreciated the wealth. Her mother was a housewife who did her best in keeping the house tidy and to raise their daughter. She went, or well, used to go, anyways, to San Juan Diego Catholic High, and her parents were so proud of her straight As that her father bought her a brand new Audi. If it wasn’t for being here, she would’ve taken lessons to drive it around, and she would go to so many places with her dear high school sweetheart, named Jamie, and they would’ve went to the high school prom, have her first kiss, get married, have children, maybe even be as rich as her father. It was the same fairytale bullshit that the high school teachers would tell you to try to make your life like. But she knew it was nothing but bullshit. She couldn’t predict this happening. To be stuck in this shitty mental hospital for a year, and to have Jamie break up with her after waiting for so long to be released. She could stay here for as long as she wanted: her father was rich. She had good insurance. But eventually, her father would give up too, and the hospital would drop her, and she would probably live the rest of her life as a homeless hag she used to think she wasn’t even close to becoming. But it was very slowly, like some kind of hideous leech that was slowly sucking everything out of her life, going to drain her of everything until she was pathetic and weak, and it was what she will become.

Maybe it wasn’t so bad, she tried to tell herself. Rummaging through trash cans and find half-eaten food people were willing to waste, traveling and sleeping anywhere she wanted, except home and in a bed. Her father may have been kind to her now, but she knew his patience was wearing thin. He was a rope that kept her hanging, but its thread was getting thinner, until she dropped and plunged into that deep ocean, or he was going to tie it around her neck and choke her blue.

Why did she think of suicide so much? Why was she so depressed? Why did she constantly think of her demise? If only the doctors could give her a definitive answer, but they ended up asking her the questions. She hated the doctors here. They never knew what was going on in her head. She had so many things running through it, so many mice that scurried through her brain, chewing on it ever so slowly. The medicines were supposed to be the cats to chase them away. But she began to think: maybe I like the mice. Mice are cute. And soft and have black little noses. They didn’t mean to harm anyone. They just thought my brain was a good place to hide.

She was used to this sickness. She slowly began to think no one deserved to be happy. The world was nothing but a sickening place. Look at the media, she thought. You must buy this! You must eat this! You have to buy this dress! You must be skinny if you want to get anywhere in this world! How disgusting this world really is. My father just fuels this fire that will eventually burn down all of civilization, until there’s nothing but maggots and roaches that carry on in the streets.

So that’s why she thought about flaring herself up. It was simply symbolic. To show everyone how much this world really needed to burn down into the ground.  
It started with Jamie. He was the one who rubbed those sticks together, or set alight the match. It all started with one simple comment he gave her, when she baked cupcakes during her father’s great, and fake, family gatherings.

You’re such a pig. Oink oink.

She tried to laugh it off. Oh Jamie. He’s being his usual joking self. You can never take whatever he says so seriously. But she looked at herself in the mirror, and began to see so many flaws, so many cracks in her appearance. She was 70 lbs. And she thought that she was going to grow a snout and tail. Oink oink. Better eat your slop so you can get bigger for Farmer John’s slaughter. Oink oink.

She didn’t eat as much. It slowly began to dwindle little by little. No more cake and ice cream. Then, no more breakfast, breakfast foods are so fattening. No dinner either. Eat a few things in the afternoon. Maybe.

Jamie complimented her on how much weight she lost. “Looking good, Amy! You really look like a million bucks!”  
“Do I really?” This was about the only thing that month that made her smile this big. She didn’t remember being so happy for anything in a while. 

“Yeah, I was thinking of taking you out somewhere. Maybe to a fancy place that has salad. Don’t want to go to the burger joint. Knowing you, you’ll eat chili cheese fries and three burgers like nothing.”

And that comment rang in her head again as she stared in those eyes, to see if he was only kidding. Oink oink.

Her grades began to slip then. She slowly questioned why she needed good grades. She wasn’t even sure on what she wanted to do in her life anyways. She thought about being a nurse. But she hated blood. She hated gross things like feces. A writer. But she couldn’t even focus on writing even 500 words, and her teachers never thought she was much of a good poet anyways. An actress. But she very much hated the Hollywood lifestyle. She would recoil in disgust at all the celebrities on her TV. They were the very reason why this civilization needed to burn.

She thought as she watched TV on these “star-crossed lovers”, these celebrities, getting married, knowing they never really knew what true love was like. Even the love between her and Jamie was more real than these phonies on TV. She hated them, even if she didn’t know them personally. She wanted to take a match and burn her $1,000 dress and make the whole ceremony in flames. She wasn’t sure why either. She couldn’t even realize on how much she was changing; to someone she didn’t even know anymore. As she thought all these women on television was nothing but pigs for Farmer John’s slaughter. Oink oink.

It was then that she began to toy in her mind of various methods of suicide. Would it be slashing her wrists? Or hanging herself? Or jumping off the bridge? What would it be, my dear gal? You only get one wish, only one chance to change everything. You better choose wisely my dear.

She remembered that day, oh so clearly. She didn’t remember how many pills she took. It was only Advil. She just wanted to see what it was like to be so close to the verge of death, praying to something out there if she would be revived. She took the whole bottle, to see what would happen. The pills tasted disgusting to her as they all slid in her throat, but she watched the E! channel, waiting for her demise, and she would die, right here, watching pigs getting ready for their slaughter. She realized she was a pig herself, with this wealthy lifestyle and her Audi and her boyfriend who she realized didn’t give a damn about her either way. She had nothing to lose. She wanted to die. It wasn’t her favorite form of death. But it would do pig. It would do.

She was in a pool of darkness, trying to rise from the depths as she saw white silhouettes dancing on the waves. She heard speaking, muttering also, of people talking to her as she was slowly drowning, trying to usher her to keep her head above the tide. But maybe she wanted to sink into the depths, to see what she would find, to see if she would find any lost treasure hidden in her life, her life that she knew wasn’t worth anything. These flickers of light continued to dance above the waves, like white blazing people that she thought she knew, but she wanted to stay here, in the dark waters, to see what she would find. Would she find people that were as lost and damaged and as cynical and shitty and hypocritical as she was? Could she live in a land where everyone thought like her, talked like her, and were as fucked up as her? She wanted to imagine it, until her lids were propped open by light.

Her consciousness was slowly unraveling, as they put some kind of tube down her throat. She wished she could tell them to stop, but they were inside her too far, as they pumped all the pills out of her body. Her father was there, so worried, holding onto her as he was so afraid of losing her. Jamie didn’t seem to care though. He was there, but what was he doing? Smirking? Laughing? Laughing at such a petty suicide? She slowly began to hate him, but she knew she would never be able to break up with this bastard. She still thought he was still her high school sweetheart, and you should always stay with your high school sweetheart. And get married. And have three or four children. And be rich like her father. After all, she wasn’t good at anything. Jamie was practicing to become a doctor. He would bring home all the money, like her father, while she would be a housewife like her mother. Families tend to repeat, it seems. And maybe her children would find high school sweethearts and get married and be rich too, and the cycle would just repeat over and over again.

Her father cried. He said he would take her to therapy, and he would pay for it. Pay for her medicine, no matter how expensive. Pay for any kind of treatment available. He was desperate. Jamie, however, sat there, saying nothing. Her mother wasn’t here. She couldn’t drive. Her father didn’t bother bringing her up here. Families tend to repeat.

Her face was bruised, so lined up with her purple splotches that looked almost black, her skin becoming yellow as if with decay. She didn’t eat in all this time. But the hospital forced her to eat while she was here, and she hated it. And she hated her doctor. He kept telling her everything was going to be all right, when she knew there was too much chaos in her head, too much chaos with her life for everything to be okay. It was simply putting a white sheet over a dead body. She was dead herself. There was no use reviving her. She just wanted to lie in this hospital bed, until she was rotted and decayed. She continued to watch all these old movies, which glorified love and the simple life in the ‘50s. Or ‘60s. She wasn’t sure which. She hated those time periods. Why didn’t anyone focus on the now instead of watching these stupid movies about times that should be long forgotten.  
And she remembered on how on that day, her nurse brought her some extra slices of ham. Oink oink.

Her doctor said the best hospital for her to stay in and recover was a hospital called Wonderland State. A state hospital. All she did was try to attempt suicide with Advil, why should she go to a state hospital? She met with Dr. Splinter, a strange man who wore a tie and t-shirt, telling her that this hospital was the best for her. Wonderland uses state of the art techniques for depression. But you need to be committed. You might stay there for a while. This isn’t a week-long vacation. You have serious depression, Amy Rose. But believe us, things will get better.

Jamie held her hand. And she cried.

She didn’t want to stay in this hospital for such a long time. Even if she kept thinking of her demise in such creative ways. But there was no turning back now. She told her therapist of all these interesting things. On how she hated her father. He was such a misogynist pig. Oink oink. Her boyfriend was a pig too. Oink oink. All these celebrities she saw on TV were stupid pigs ready to be butchered. Oink oink. Squeal. And she hated them all.

She remembered what she used to be like. A charming, happy girl, with good grades. A high school sweetheart. About to graduate from her senior year. Got a scholarship to a college of her choice. She was thinking of maybe going to Harvard, even if she knew she wasn’t that smart. Maybe she would make millions marrying her rich doctor sweetheart and make tons of generic love novels like Danielle Steel that old people and cheesy romantic teenagers would buy from her no matter what. And she could live happily ever after.

But that was gone now. It was as distant as a burning, flaming star that exploded in the universe, and turned to dust.

Ash to ash.

Dust to dust.

She wasn’t like that little girl. Not anymore.

\---

“Hey. Phony. Phony, wake up, will ya?”

His eyes slowly opened, revealing a blue sky with soft cottony clouds above him. And a black and red streaked face, a black canvas with the blood of his wrists, that was staring in his eyes, as he seemed to be wearing a red hunting cap on his head.

His hands felt something soft around him, and he lifted his body off the ground, as he tried to brush away the throes of sleep.

“What are you doing here?” he mumbled. “I don’t remember seeing you here. All I know is that I was back in that hospital and you’re…”  
“Well, you’re not in that hospital no more phony. You’re here now. Because I want to show you something. Something that I thought you would only be able to understand.”  
As he became more aware, he remembered. This black hedgehog, the one that called him artificial and fake and phony and emo and crazy…he was the one in his head, and in his dreams. All he ever dreamed about was this hedgehog, and all he heard in his head was this hedgehog talking to him. Was he really insane, to have some sort of imaginary friend become real before his very eyes, as his mind began to deteriorate and rot?

“Are…are you really real? I’ve been hearing you in my head. And this is like the second dream I’ve had about you. Who are you?”  
He grew annoyed. “I am real, unlike you. But not real to everybody. My name is Shadow. Learn that name. Because I probably won’t have that name anymore soon.”  
“Not real to everybody?” he repeated, perplexed. “What do you mean? Where I am? What is this place?”

He looked around. He was in a field, a field with dandelions and rye swaying in the wind, the sun that he thought would never see again shining on his face and the heat actually feeling real to him as it warmed his back and invigorated his body as the rays touched his face and spines, as these flowers and rye danced around him and the sky looked as blue as the wallpaper in the hospital’s bathrooms, except they had real clouds drifting in the sky, and he saw birds shooting through them too.

He was in a world, a real and alive world outside of that hospital.

“This is Wonderland phony. You know why that hospital got that name? Because there’s a world outside of here, a place you thought that you could never imagine. A world that Alice never thought existed until she fell down the rabbit hole. This is why this hospital is called Wonderland.”

He was amazed as he gazed at the flowers, the sun, the sky, the vast world beyond him. He saw cotton drifts and bits of rye flow in the wind as he looked; something that he thought only existed in television. But this was a very real world; a breathing world that he thought could only be shown with glass and a brilliant display of lights with many actors who knew that this world was as fake as they were, when he was admitted inside the hospital. When he was admitted, he was sure even the other patients thought this too, that the whole entire world became dead, and it seemed to be nothing but some sort of fantasy the doctors invented, that they said you could only enter that world until you were fully functional, like some kind of machine that still needed the right gears and the right tune-up before they could use you. But the truth was that they would continue to use these pills on you, as they continued to build you into their liking, but you never went out into that world. He thought of this also as a toy that was threaded and stuffed up and made all cute to the children outside of the toy shop, wanting to go to that world as a child picked you up, but you never were, and eventually all the years you would remain as a lonely toy that never knew what it was like in that world, until you probably burned away because you were never going to go out.

“Hey phony, are you paying attention to me? I said I wanted to show you something. You’re aware that this world exists now. But you still need to learn about it. This world is very fragile, like glass. And if you hold it the wrong way or don’t know where to keep it at, it’s going to break. And instead of the world breaking, it’s you breaking. And I want you to know that until you’re driven insane by those other phonies in that hospital.”

They walked through the field, touching the flowers that rubbed their golden pollen on them, and the rye that tickled the air with their feathery heads. The wind blew on their faces gently and moved through their quills, making them quiver, making them into blue and black and red shades of grass.  
He wondered why this Shadow knew about the hospital, the world outside of this one. But he thought he couldn’t ask any more questions. Shadow wanted to show him this something badly.

It was then that Sonic and Shadow stopped, as they reached the end of the dandelion field. It ended with a cliff that overlooked pitch black darkness, nothing but blackness waited at the end of this precipice, wanting to swallow this world whole.

“This is The End phony. This is The End of Wonderland. Let me tell you about The End. It’s something you should really avoid at all times. And I mean that. This isn’t a place you should go to at all. Once you fall down that cliff, you lose your mind. You lose everything. But mostly your mind. And the thing that mankind should fear most of all is when they lose the only thing that keeps their goddam selves knowing exactly on what’s right or wrong. They lose themselves. Everything becomes a blur. It’s torture. Hell. Let me tell you another thing phony, Wonderland keeps the key to your sanity, between heaven and hell. And you know what they’re going to try to do with it? They’re going to take it, and swallow it like some kind of goddam snake. And the last thing you should do when you’re in this place is lose your mind. And so many of the people here, some aren’t going to have this problem I think, but you have to make sure you don’t make them lose their minds. Do you hear me? Sanity is gold. Sanity is a very good thing to have. And if you lose it, you are stuck here, and you lose the rebellion. You lose the war. Do you get that phony? Do you get that?”

“The…rebellion? What do you mean?” He knew that he had to hold onto sanity; otherwise he would be trapped here. Locked in a bile green cage where the doctors tested all kinds of chemicals on them, only living as lab rats to Dr. Splinter, or as Shadow was calling him, the King of Spades. Seeing that there was a world here and how eccentric that Dr. Splinter was and all those drawings that were made with the bone shaped brushes that were used to paint their world and make it come alive, the bones of another dead patient…there was something at play here. A conspiracy.

“There’s a war here, phony. A nasty war. A war against the King of Spades. He knows how to get you to worship him. The King of Spades thinks he’s some kind of god, you know? Worshipping him like the Christian God that people always thought was so loving when he can be a wrathful son of a bitch. The King of Spades will get you to surrender to his armies with whatever he can throw at you. Pills, the things he made here, driving a stick through your goddam brain, or even those shocks they dare call ‘therapy’ around here. And his soldiers don’t even know what he really means in his conquest. They are sheep, phony. Cards. They don’t have any other thought than what they’re playing up against. Do you get me phony? There’s a war here. A rebellion. And I want you to be the leader of the Rebels. You look weak, kind of fucked up, but I think you’re capable. You seem to have a better know-how about these things than any of the people in this hospital. I want you to fulfill a mission for me.”  
“Wait a minute!” he yelled, holding onto his arm, Shadow gazing at him with his scarred eyes. “’Weak’? ‘ Kind of fucked up?’ You don’t know what you’re talking to! I work for nearly ten hours in that damn mill from my dad and I only got into this mess because I wanted to get away from my life, take a vacation, you know! I’m not fucked up! I didn’t even want to be here or even be in this army of yours!”  
“Phony, I know many things about you. I know that you tried to escape from school and your mom and pop. But if you don’t join in this rebellion against the King of Spades, you’re through. You know that? You’ll be here forever. The King of Spades needs you, and he will try to get you to be in his army. He’s like Uncle Sam, you know? Pointing that finger at you and says he needs you. But you need to bite that finger. Bite it until it goddam bleeds. Cause this Uncle Sam, the King of Spades, he’s a lowlife. He’s going to get all of your friends trapped here. And convert them to King of Spadesism. He’s evil, and if you want to get out of this goddam hospital you might as well listen to me, otherwise you’re never going to get out of here.”

The King of Spades, or Dr. Splinter, looked much too weak to be a king, a ruthless ruler over this land. But if this whole world was kept a secret to him, then maybe there was more he didn’t know of this Dr. Splinter. He seemed to keep his secrets well, if these nurses and other staff didn’t even know of his heinous operations.

“Alright, fine! I’ll be your leader. What do you want me to do? Try to tell everyone here of what Dr. Splinter is doing?”  
“Yes, but there’s also more. It’s a very important mission phony, and you really can’t mess this up. One slip-up, and you might as well consider this army of yours done. You have a big responsibility, and you have to make sure yourself that you don’t lose your sanity. Your mission, phony, is that I will from now on consider you as the catcher in the rye.”  
“Catcher in the rye? What do you…”  
“You will need to catch your soldiers whenever you can when they seem to be near The End. And you have to put them back up here. That’s the catcher in the rye. But that doesn’t mean the catcher in the rye itself can’t lose his wings. You have to make sure you don’t go near The End too. The King of Spades will make sure all of you will go near The End and lose your mind, but as long as your heart is strong, you will make sure he loses his crown. It’s not a wise idea to try to kill the King of Spades in the outside world. He’s protected, and this entire place is a fortress. The only thing you can do is go to this world and try to kill him there. It’s your only chance, your only shot, and when he dies, you will finally start to live.”  
“And…how do I get to this world here, and how do the others get here too? Any ideas?” he asked.  
“The black door,” he said. “There’s a black door, where they imprison two patients from all contact from the outside world, even to the rest of the hospital. You have to make sure you go there somehow. They fuel most of the power here, like little electric factories. But you have to go there only when you really can. It’s sealed up tight. And I will just have to leave the job of how you can get it open to you, catcher in the rye. Maybe you can get the other patients to help you. Whatever it will take to go into that world, to free those two prisoners, to enter the real world of Wonderland.”

He knew exactly what door he was talking about. The Chronics Ward door. They kept them there to power Splinter’s entire kingdom. They really weren’t helping them. They were just simply pawns in the King’s chessboard.

“It’s time for you to wake up now phony. You will remember everything I said. I leave this entire job to you. Remember: you are the catcher in the rye, and you can’t fuck up. Not one bit. Do you get that?”

He took off his cap and placed it on top of Sonic’s head, as if this was supposedly his crown, the sign of leadership in this Rebel Army that Shadow created.

“And I don’t say this often, but good luck. Kick the King of Spades’ ass, alright? He needs a royal asskicking, not a royal asskissing.” Sonic thought he could see a small hint of a smile on his face, before everything was consumed by a bright flash of white, and the dandelion fields, the sky, The End, everything, was gone, and he was met by the blinding whiteness of padded walls yet again.


	5. Nack's Story, A New Ally

He met one weasel who wore a glass eye that day. And it always stared at him. Unceasingly.

It was his partner, whom he called One Eye. He fell asleep next to him, snoring loudly and obnoxiously, breaking his thoughts as he tried to think about what got him here in the first place. Enough of that, he thought. He didn’t want to hear how tired he was all the time, how hungry he was, how much he wanted to go back home. He constantly whined so much he wished he could take a staple gun to his mouth and shut his trap.

The police called him Fang the Sniper, on account of that he nearly blew a shopkeeper’s head up. Just for fun. There was really no rhyme or reason to it. And One Eye was supposed to travel there and take his money while he laid there, dead. But for some reason, he couldn’t find the shop before the police came. One Eye wasn’t very bright.

And he was here, in this police car, with two police officers, and he was heading straight to jail, where he’ll be tried for attempted murder. He nearly killed the shopkeep. Almost.

And as One Eye drooled on him, he said he needed to piss.

“Can it, asshole! You’re going to have to wait until we’re at the jail!”

But he really needed to piss and he thought he couldn’t hold it much longer.

He felt like he was four years old again, but it was unbearable in there. The car had no AC, and it was hot in that stifling Texas heat. One Eye was snoring and drooling on him. And his bladder was seriously about to burst and he might as well have blasted the whole car in piss.

He whined a lot, just like One Eye. The police told him to shut up a few times.

They thought he needed to suffer for nearly blasting that guy’s brain open. “So shut up and enjoy your freedom for a little while, because soon you’re going to have everything, everything you just took for granted, taken away from you. And you deserve it. Bastard.”

He didn’t even shoot anyone and he was being punished. He wished that someone would’ve kept their trap shut about the whole incident and he would’ve gotten away with it. But he realized that the whole crime was carried unprofessionally. He was out in plain sight, in daylight, out of a window that if anyone wanted to look at the buildings they would see him with a sniper rifle. He could barely aim that gun, as he wasn’t so good with sniper rifles. No one was really hurt. Except he was going to jail. But no one cared about him. No one cared about poor old Nack, who was going to be locked away for seven years. No one cared about him ever since he was a kid. His mom and dad mistreated him for so long, and that was he was here, so fucked up, ready to go to jail.

One Eye was a gray weasel who lost his other eye a long time ago. He was a child, when suddenly his eye was bleeding and nearly ripped in half by his retarded brother who thought it would be funny to shove a fork in it. He wondered if eyes were soft, like paper. He said as his eye oozed blood that they were a lot like olives.

One Eye’s family was never right. He could’ve been inbred but managed to not become fully retarded like his brother. His mother was an alcoholic too. She could’ve drunk many beers when she was pregnant with both of them. But Fang had alcoholic people in his family too. They just weren’t right altogether.

Fang had never been into prison. He’s been in juvenile hall a long time ago, but it wasn’t like prison. They can lock you in and throw away the key, and Fang was looking at a long time in jail. So was One Eye. Even if One Eye was stupid he was the only guy in the world he liked. He trusted him. He was too stupid to tell any secrets. He almost had an innocuous nature, on account of how stupid he was. He wasn’t fully retarded, but he was pretty damn close. He dropped out of high school in his freshman year, without even having the ability to read and write anything above a 2nd grade level. He couldn’t add up simple numbers. The only class he was somewhat good in was art, but he didn’t really need to use his brain much in that class.

But there was something he liked about him. He listened to him whenever he rambled. He pitied him a little no matter how cruel he seemed to be sometimes. He made him laugh sometimes. Sometimes he thought he was a real riot. So he began to talk to him when they were close to Travis State Jail.

“One Eye, how are you keeping up with all this? We’re going to jail.”  
He yawned, as he interrupted him from his slumber, but he stirred awake at the very mention of jail.   
“Golly, jail? I thought we were good peeps, you and I, Nack! Nothin’ but a couple of kids, you know? We just needed money so you wanted me to ask the shopkeeper man if I can have some! Then golly gee whillikers, the police found me and we’re here! We shouldn’t be here Nack, shouldn’t we?”

One Eye seemed to be the very epitome of innocence that old men would try to show you that existed in the ‘50s. He still said things such as “golly gee whillikers” and “oh my dear father in heaven” and even described some black men as “colored people” without even knowing why it was offensive. He learned these words from his grandma when he was raised by her, back when his mother disappeared suddenly for a long time. His grandmother still tried to hold onto the ‘50s as much as she could, by listening to show tunes and having her TV always on TV Land, usually playing I Love Lucy and Dick Van Dyke. His grandmother was strange too, Nack thought. She took many pills and spoke differently sometimes. He wondered if maybe she had multiple personalities or something. At least they all seemed to care about One Eye, if that was true.

And for some reason, he felt bad for One Eye right now. He was innocent. That he knew. He was probably too stupid to pull a crime such as his anyways. He wondered if they were going to charge him. Probably not. He would probably get off on how stupid he was.

And there was mental illness too.

It was suddenly that a realization came to him. These police officers, and this town, barely knew much about him, not much since he was released from juvenile hall 20 years ago. He can fake a mental illness. If he was good at acting, he could be sent somewhere else. The loony bin. But he would rather be locked in a place where they served better food and actually gave you a blanket and cared about you than this shithole. He heard Travis State was a pretty shitty jail. By jail standards, anyways.

And maybe if he could get One Eye to believe him (which he knew would be very easy to do), then he would have a witness to how sick he was.

“One Eye.”  
“Huh?”  
“I hear voices sometimes. They tell me to kill people at night.”  
“They do?” he shouted, incredulous. “But you should never kill people, that’s what grandmamma tells me! All people are good! Never kill anyone, nah huh!” He shook his head vigorously.  
“Is your grandmamma a telepathic messenger from Mars?”  
“A-a what?” He would’ve scratched his head if he wasn’t handcuffed. “I really don’t know what that means, but she ain’t from Mars, nah huh! She’s from Earth silly! All people know that! Golly gee!”  
“But the aliens in my head tell me she’s from Mars, and I have to kill people to become a new Jesus. Do you know that?”  
“Nah huh!” He was shaking his head again. “You are being silly Nack! You don’t know nothin’! Even I know Jesus is Jesus and my grandmamma is from mother Earth! Where in school did they teach you that?”

Good. He had him convinced that he was acting strange, even if he knew that would be easy. The officers stopped the car now, and he could see out the windows to look at this jail, this gray fortress that he would be in while he would be on trial. He saw two guards smoking their cigarettes, wispy streams floating in the sizzling heated air as they latched onto both Nack and One Eye and directed them to the dungeon. Nack felt like asking one of the guards for a smoke. He needed cigs. It’s been a while since he had one, and he was afraid of doing favors for these people just to get a pack. He was figuring he had to give a blowjob just so he can get a hit of tobacco in his system for a while.

So he asked.

“Hell no, bastard! Enjoy your time in jail!”  
“Then I’m afraid my girlfriend Cassadena would have to kill you.”  
“Golly gee whillikers Nack, I didn’t know you had a girlfriend!”  
“And why would she kill us, boy?” the guard snapped, his cigarette’s red light still flickering as he took yet another hit and smoke unfurled around his nostrils.  
He was growing annoyed at this man calling him boy as if he was 14 again. “Because she has telepathic abilities, and she knows where you live.”  
“How about you shut up with retard here and enjoy your damn stay, boy!”  
He could only growl and mutter under his breath. The police took him inside the building as One Eye questioned him. “Nack, what’s a retard?”  
He was too angry to try to be nice to him. “Someone who doesn’t shut the hell up.”

And he shut up.

He stayed in the same room as One Eye. He wasn’t sure why they did this. But he thought he was lucky. One Eye was annoying, but at least he was too stupid to try to rape him.

“Golly, we’re in jail Nack! This place isn’t too good, no siree! Everyone here has tattoos and live a life of sin! My grandmamma always said…”  
“The hell to your grandmamma! How about you shut up and go to sleep you dingbat!”  
“That’s not a nice thing to say…” But he closed his eyes and was silenced by sleep instantaneously. He snored loudly, but it was better than his yapping.

He finally relieved his bladder by taking a piss, and he wondered if the guards and the police truly did believe him. His insanity seemed real to them. But maybe his tricks only worked on retards.

Maybe his crimes were just petty, similar to how he committed them when he was 14. He always told One Eye that they would become rich, live the good life of the mafia, have a dinner of steak and rolls every night. Of course it meant he might have to kill someone once in a while, but he wondered if he really could get One Eye to help him put a bullet through someone’s brain. He knew he could murder these people and have One Eye be completely oblivious while he mindlessly did other operations he needed to do. He was simply nothing but a puppet with no consciousness of being controlled by a puppeteer. They would always show him how great that life was on TV. Scarface, the Godfathers, the Sopranos, they had good lives before they were shot down. He told himself he might as well crash and burn while he lived this life. He couldn’t really see himself going anywhere else. He might as well give One Eye the gift of the good life too he thought. He knew there was really nothing special waiting for him either. One Eye told him his mother died. His brother was sent to some kind of foster home that knew how to take care of him and was probably not going to get out any time soon. His grandmother was most likely dead too. His father? Where the hell would he be at anyways, denying both his sons? Nack told him that he promised to shoot him when he found him, and they were going to toss his body into the river. One Eye nearly jumped for joy and clapped his hands, even if he hated the idea of killing people.

“I hate my father, oh my good lord! Never helped my mama! Never helped my grandmamma! Always called me nothin’ oh my father in heaven!”

He had to be honest with himself. The only person he truly had a real motive to kill was One Eye’s father. Everyone else was merely bystanders to his operations, and he thought if he had to shoot a few people to carry them, so be it. But to deny One Eye the life of a normal kid with a father that actually attempted to give a damn about him…he just couldn’t imagine it. Even his father attempted, even if he once beat him black and blue and made him lose a couple of teeth and fangs over it. But then again, this was where he was now. In jail, and he thought he could’ve been given the life sentence.

He stared at the gray of the stone walls, and felt the rough texture as he slid his finger across it. He didn’t want to stare at anything else while he tried to sleep that reminded him of how shitty things were now, and eventually, he was too tired to stare anymore, and he was asleep.

 

—-

“Hey! Hey you! How about you and retard get up! It’s time for your trial!”

Two weeks passed since he was first sent to the jail, and One Eye began to cry like a little child about how he wanted to go home and the place was scary and he missed going outside and playing in the open sun. He missed the outside too, but he was used to this, since he was sent to juvenile hall all those years ago. He remembered not seeing the sun and only given brief reminders of how it looked when he smelled it. But he couldn’t smell the sun so well here. This jail had the distinct smell of blood, shit, and piss, and remainders of cigarette smoke that made him crave so much for one. He was surprised that no one wanted to hurt him or even threaten One Eye. Maybe the people in this jail were above that. He thought if they tried to stab a retard, basically an adult child, they were no higher than scum.

Nack tried to seclude himself as much as he could, even if it meant not eating in the cafeteria and going to the showers. He tried to lock himself in his cell at all times, conversing with One Eye even if all he did was whine and cry. He read some random book that the guard gave him. Turned out it was the Bible. He read it anyways, just to pass the time. He thought it was great reading material, reading all that blood and torture.

Both he and One Eye were handcuffed again while they were led into the courtroom, walking beside each other while gazing at the other’s eyes. But One Eye couldn’t see his golden eyes wavering in fear. His pupil was motionless. It was only glass, and he couldn’t see anything with it.  
They might as well have replaced his eye with an olive, he thought. It would’ve functioned the same.

“Nack, what caused you to want to take a sniper rifle, hold it outside the window, and try to kill the shopkeeper from a distance? You admitted you were trying to kill him. But why?”

The judge was glaring in his direction. He thought it was strange, to have those eyes actually function and be able to see him as they bore into him, awaiting his answer.  
He thought of what he had to say, and tried to look as much as an insane criminal he saw on TV as much as he could. He already had the appearance he thought, as he hadn’t showered in days.

“I heard voices. They told me to kill people sirs. They told me if I killed this man I would become the new Jesus and save the world from destruction. You see, there’s these new Cain and Abels, and this new Abel had to die, as the snake and ravens told me to do. The voices are the snakes and ravens sir. I’ve seen them with my very own eyes.”

The judge nodded, looking like he was convinced. A little. “Nack, have you ever been diagnosed with any serious mental illness in the past? Anything like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder?”  
“I don’t know sirs, but I think the snakes and ravens don’t want me to take those weird tests. Because then you guys would kill me and send me to Hell, like the new Abel was supposed to go into.” And he laughed, a really fake, too hysterical laugh that screeched, but still he thought they would buy into it. If only they were retards too.

The judge lifted his spectacles from the bridge of his nose, his brow furrowing as he now looked skeptical about his explanation. “You may be seated Nack. Now, a professional psychologist will analyze you for any mental illness you may have, but I will advise you of something: there are many criminals who come in here, faking a mental illness, trying to get off free on their crimes. Maybe you do have a mental illness, but I’m telling you right now that you have to really convince us that you weren’t thinking rationally Nack, or else you will be in this jail for seven years. I’ve heard about your record when you were in juvenile hall. You were a selfish teen who didn’t care about nobody! I was even shocked that at the age of 12 you claimed you didn’t care about the 10 year old boy you beat senselessly. You said you only wanted his money! So you have to convince me, really convince me that you’re mentally ill, otherwise you’ll end up where you belong, and that’s in the slammer in Travis State. Unless your friend here can convince me otherwise. I call Duncan “One Eye” the weasel to the stand, and he can tell me all about this situation.”

One Eye lurched to the seat near the judge, his one functioning eye wavering and even tearing up a little. Nack thought he looked nervous wracked as hell. He believed he should’ve been the one nervous, as if this psychologist finds out about his game; he would be trapped in this rot for a long time. Even if it was the judge trying to intimidate him, it was One Eye that was sweating and huffing. He wiped his brow, looking dazed like a deer about to be run over by a monstrous car with glaring headlights as he hastily sat down.

“Duncan, or as some of your friends call you, ‘One Eye’. Is it true that your friend here, Nack, wasn’t thinking rationally when he put that sniper rifle outside the window and tried to shoot that man? You can tell us the truth. We don’t want you to worry young man.”

Damn it, he might fuck this up! Look at him, freaking out! One Eye isn’t a very damn good liar! He’s too stupid to lie!

He lowered his head, gazing at his feet. “Yes. Nack has always been a little weird. He always tells me about those snakes and ravens. Golly gee, he thought a snake was talking to him one day to steal candy from a candy store and bury it in his backyard to make a candy tree. He really did that too. He got a bunch of M&Ms…”  
“Objection your honor,” a well-dressed woman, the shopkeeper’s lawyer, stated as she rose. “I really think he’s trying to cover up for Nack’s crime! I mean, for God’s sake, this Duncan fellow seems to be mentally handicapped! He shouldn’t be held responsible for this crime at all! I think Nack should be given the sentence while Duncan should be acquitted!”  
“Well, I shouldn’t be!” he yelled back, his face flaring. “Because I was the one who thought about killing him! I planned it! I told my buddy Nack to get the bullets and gun and shoot the shopkeep and that the snakes and ravens were real, because lord almighty did that shopkeep made me mad! He never let me buy anything! He always made fun of me! So I told Nack that he should listen to the voices in his head and kill him! Because I hate him! He never let me buy anything cause I’m dumb, oh father in heaven! Lord almighty!”

The court room was now filled with silence and tension, shocked about One Eye’s sudden change in personality. One Eye’s face was very red, as he surged from his seat and stomped the ground, screaming and crying like a small child. “He ain’t nice to me at all, no siree! He ain’t nice to me at all!”

The mustached man, who Nack knew was the shopkeeper he was so close to killing two weeks ago, lifted himself from his seat, his face becoming just as red as One Eye’s and his voice trying to pierce through his tantrum. “Objection your honor! I never mistreated Duncan or One Eye or whatever people call him because I barely know this damn weasel and the important thing is that I saw Nack in that window and he tried to kill me and I’m pretty damn sure he was pretty damn rational when he was about to put a damn bullet in my brain!”  
“I demand silence in the court room! Order!” He slammed his gavel, a loud boom that silenced everyone, even One Eye who was raving about the imaginary crimes he committed against him virtually nonstop. He became bashful again, his face now blushing and he sat back down, staring at his feet.  
“Duncan, based on your past IQ tests that were conducted by your psychologists, you were diagnosed as semi-retarded, and based on your history this was confirmed as your mother drank alcohol while you were conceived. I honestly do not believe you did anything against this man, as Mr. Morgan claims that he barely even knows you! Hell, you don’t even look like you can harm a single fly! The only thing we need to know in this trial is if your friend, who really shouldn’t be your friend, Nack, is really mentally ill and could not think rationally while he tried to shoot Mr. Morgan. If Nack really was as insane as he seems to claim…Duncan, is it really true that you tried to convince Nack to kill Mr. Morgan?”  
He nodded. “Uh huh. I thought it would be fun to make his head explode like an egg!”  
“If that is true, I do not believe you deserve to be in jail, but rather, an institution that is better equipped to deal with handicapped cases such as yours, while Nack will be sent to a different one. However, if Nack is making this all up, which I don’t doubt, Nack will be sentenced to seven years in prison for attempted murder and I will have to let you go free, as you were merely an innocent bystander. I will set aside some time for the psychological testing of Nack to be conducted, and when I receive the results the jury will decide if he is guilty. The defense and the jury shall rest until the testing is complete.”  
“Objection!” Mr. Morgan was fuming again, his voice as deafening as the judge’s gavel. “You can clearly see that he’s taking the blame for him! Can’t you see he’s innocent? I know a little about Nack, he’s a conniving, evil, self-absorbed…”  
“Order!” Smack. “Mr. Morgan, I will have to let the psychological testing and the jury determine that. I cannot go by just your allegations. The court shall now rest.”

\---

“You believe this is the right order? That the boy called for help, started the fire, the boy cried, and the firemen stopped the fire?” There were white cards with small caricatures in front of him, depicting a small boy, a fire, and firemen spraying the fire with a hose. Nack heard about this sort of test before. He heard of criminals, really insane criminals, putting these cards in a strange order and then they were claimed to be psychotic. And that was what he had to act like. A psychotic criminal where right and wrong were just blended into a gray.

He was amazed that One Eye even wanted to take the blame for him. He always treated One Eye like shit, but yet he wanted to defend him from going to jail and making up his story of how he convinced him to kill the shopkeeper. But even when he mentioned his head exploding like an egg One Eye seemed worried and the fact that he didn’t believe anyone but his father deserved to die marked his face, but yet the judge bought into it. If he could make the psychologist buy into the whole psychotic and delusional criminal act by knowing what he needed to answer in all these tests, they would both be sent away to mental hospitals. They would both need to wear straitjackets and talk like loonies with mouths seeming to be full of peanut butter as they spoke.

His aunt was in a mental hospital long ago. They didn’t seem too bad. They gave her medicine that made her life better, the food was better, and people were paid to listen to you talk about your feelings. In jail your life was nothing but a downward spiral from there, and the food was possibly made from nothing but ground up intestines from some unknown animal and no one gave a damn about how you were suffering there. Sure, he had to deal with other loonies, but in mental hospitals most of the time they left you alone. In prison, you still had a good chance of being stabbed with a makeshift weapon that man spent hours making just to see you bleed and beg for mercy, and he probably wanted you to have sex with him too, because he hasn’t seen his girlfriend in so long you might as well pretend to be her, his bitch.

The only thing he probably couldn’t stand in a mental hospital was that most likely there were no smoke breaks. He needed a cigarette. Bad.

And the lack of nicotine was beginning to make him seem more of an ass than usual.

“So you said you have no friends other than One Eye?”  
“Never had any friends, and you’re definitely not considered as my friend either you sack of pig shit! Now give me my damn cigarettes!”  
The doctor seemed unfazed by his insults, but he sunk his hands into his pockets and pulled out a pack of Marlboro Reds, and handed a cigarette to him.  
And it felt so damn good to him to have that one last hit before he either was sent into a shithole or a place where almost everyone nearly forgot their names.  
And he wondered why he was even called Nack in the first place.

\---

“He is psychotic, your honor. Truly psychotic. He really does believe snakes and ravens talk to him and that there are new Cain and Abels and basically the entire events of the Bible are repeating. I recommend, and I also ask of the jury, to consider putting both of them in separate mental institutions, ones that are equipped to deal with their illnesses. I believe Duncan should be sent to Austin State Hospital and Nack to a new facility called Wonderland State, that deals with serious cases as his. But I believe with the right treatment, Nack can go back into society as a normal individual and not live the life of a criminal back when he was in juvenile hall. However, I believe he should be fully monitored in case he really isn’t mentally ill, and we can send him back to Travis State Jail to live his sentence of seven years any time.”  
“Thank you Dr. Splinter, you may now rest from the stand.” The judge was confounded that Dr. Splinter actually wore a full suit today. He usually wore a plain t-shirt and tie, even if this was a court room. But he always thought doctors who dealt with the mind were always a little…strange.   
“The court now rests on the jury.”

Hours passed, and both Nack and One Eye were both stressed, for nearly the same reasons. One Eye wanted Nack to go free. He knew he didn’t mean to hurt anyone. And Nack wanted to get away from jail, so maybe he could get “treated” and live that good life, even if he did had to hurt a few people. 

He glanced at Dr. Splinter. He heard he was the representative of Wonderland State Hospital. He thought naming a hospital Wonderland was a little peculiar. It reminded him of a book he used to read. And Dr. Splinter looked peculiar himself, with his thick glasses and balding head and red sideburns and his red knuckles that almost looked pallid under the court’s bright light. He looked like a freak himself, and something just didn’t sit right with him, even if he did grant him enough mercy to claim he was insane and to give him a cig. The man was just a huge oddity, almost as much as an oddity to how a schizophrenic talks. He had a sheet of paper now and seemed to be writing something down…in big, long strokes. Maybe he had the same handwriting as John Hancock.

The jury returned. So much time has passed since they thought about this trial. He closed his eyes and crossed his fingers tightly, biting his lip with his giant fang.

“We the jury, find the defendants Duncan ‘One Eye’ the weasel and Nack the weasel, not guilty, on account of insanity and mental retardation. We believe they should be sent to different mental hospitals to cope with their mental illnesses, for as long as a few years. We the jury now rest.”

Yes! Finally, God decided to bless me, even if I claimed I was his new son!

“So it is decided,” the judge said. “Nack will be sent to Wonderland State Hospital and Duncan will be sent to Austin State. However Nack, be warned, if we find out you’re really not insane, you shall serve the maximum sentence for attempted murder in Travis State Jail. And Duncan, I hope you will learn some good morals, as this is no way to treat a mentally ill person. I leave Duncan to the care of Dr. Leon in Austin State and Nack will be left with Dr. Splinter in Wonderland State. The court rests.” And with the loud smack of the gavel, they were now separated. Gone.

The police carried both of them to separate police cars, the sun gleaming on the black paint as the cicadas created a droning siren in the still air. At least Nack will know what the sun looks like. Through chain link windows. But it was much better than barred windows.

“I’m going to miss you Nack! I’m going to miss you so much! Golly gee willikers will I miss you! I’m sorry that I’m being a retard right now, but can you please write to me? Please?”  
The officer directed him to the backseat, while Nack replied, “Sure. I’ll write to you. I’ll tell you about how Wonderland State is and you can tell me about Austin State. Is that a deal?”  
Nack didn’t hear an answer from him. He was inside the car when One Eye waved frantically behind him; until the officer told him to calm down and be quiet it seemed like.

But as the sun glared in his face through the tree’s many fingers in the horizon, it was all he remembered of One Eye. 

It’s been eight months now since he’s been admitted in Wonderland State.

And he never wrote him a single letter.

 

—-

He woke up again. Except he found himself in the padded room, with the white pillows all over him again. Except this time he wasn’t restrained. At least he could move around.

The window to the door was blurry, but he saw some of the staff walking by it, pretending to not notice him. He wasn’t sure how long he’s been in here. All he remembered was his dream.

The black and red hedgehog, with the scarlet scarred face and the eyes of fire, named Shadow, giving him the title of the catcher in the rye, to direct all the patients to the kingdom of the King of Spades and to defeat him once they can enter the world of Wonderland. He wondered if it was all just some strange dream made from the side effect of the medicine they probably injected in him. But it all seemed too real. He felt the wind blowing past him. He could even feel when Shadow gave him that hunting cap. And he remembered how it felt when he approached The End of Wonderland. He felt all that darkness was going to suck him in, and he would’ve lost his mind.

He wondered what this Shadow person had that related him to this hospital. He probably was some patient here long ago, if he knew everything about this hospital and the secrets it foretold.

He stood up, stumbling a bit as the medicine was just beginning to wear off, and he turned the door knob to the door. And it opened.

He was surprised that they didn’t lock the door.  
He was in the hallway of the safety rooms, with the black door that held the serious degenerate patients. He knew Shadow also told him about that door. There were two patients inside. And they powered most of the hospital and the world beyond it. And if he could somehow get there, he would be able to enter Wonderland.

It was then that he heard muffled yelling. And a bang. And more bangs.

“You piece of shit! I’ll show you what happens when you get between my wife and Tito!”

It was coming from the door next to him. He pricked his ears to listen. And he heard another bang, and a yell shouting, “You lousy motherfucking rat!” He kept still and quiet, as he turned his head around the corridor, opened the door (it was unlocked also), and saw the culprit, the one was screaming and punching the walls and causing a commotion that could be heard all the way to the dayroom. 

It was his roommate, Knuckles, inside the safety room, punching the padding and yelling as loud as his lungs could manage. He couldn’t hear on why exactly he was irate, but he heard that Knuckles seemed to get irate by everything that happened in the hospital.

“Goddamn staff! Telling me what to do! They won’t let me see my wife! Or my kid! The hell with them!” Punch.

He was afraid that if he said anything, Knuckles was going to punch him in the gut. But he was the catcher in the rye. He had to protect all the patients here. Even if it risked him getting a hemorrhage or two.

“Hey, uh, Knux…”  
“Yeah? The hell do you…” Somehow, as if through some kind of miracle, his face softened, as he realized it wasn’t the staff talking to him.   
“Oh, I don’t believe we’ve met. You were that guy who slit his wrists for some reason, right?”  
Slit his wrists? He raised his arm, seeing that his wrist was bandaged with a tourniquet with dark blood seeping from it, much like his shoes.  
“Yeah, I think I’m that guy.”  
“What made you want to do that? Any reason at all?”  
He was surprised that he wasn’t calling him crazy. Then again, this was a state hospital. Nearly everyone admitted in here could be deemed crazy.

“I don’t remember. What made you get in here?”  
“Oh, it was some guy who said I probably had to stay in this damn place for another three months. I haven’t seen my wife and kid’s face in nearly a year! Isn’t that fucking bullshit? They don’t let me see my own wife and kid here!”  
He agreed that it was bullshit. He assumed that even with his anger, his wife and child possibly loved him a lot to not even go through a divorce since he was admitted.   
“That is awful. I’m sorry.”  
“The staff just continues to piss me off. If it wasn’t for them and the other guys continuing to push my buttons, maybe I would’ve been released a long time ago.” He faced him. “What’s your name? I’m guessing the staff already told you about me.”  
“I’m Sonic. They said I have to be in here because I’m bipolar or something. I was in Austin Lakes, but they sent me here, even though the only reason I went there was because I wanted to get away from my mom and dad. Why were you sent here?”

He shook his head. “Same reason, actually. I started getting angry at small stuff a lot. I thought eventually I was going to hurt my family. So I went in here to get away from things for a while, but I didn’t realize this was a state hospital where they could keep you here for a long time. I was originally here for maybe a week, but then that Dr. Splinter guy said I had to stay in here longer. For maybe two weeks. Then it turned into a month. Then another month. And that’s what really began to piss me off. I don’t like that Dr. Splinter. Something just doesn’t sit right with me about him.”  
“Me either. But have you ever noticed any other weird things about this hospital? Anything at all?” He was trying to get him to realize their secrets, and maybe he could let him know about Wonderland. He didn’t want him to think he was delusional.  
“Well, the colors just aren’t right here. Blue doors, pink doors, red doors, black doors…And that serious degenerate room. What kind of patients belong in there I wonder? People who don’t even deserve to see the light of day?”  
“There’s two patients in there I heard. They’re keeping them in there for a reason. And they think not seeing the sun is therapeutic.”  
“What the hell.” He faced the black door with interest. “That’s not right. Not at all. I wonder if they even feed those poor bastards. Apparently both the doctors are working with them. Well whatever they’re doing in there, it’s not working. What disorder do they have that makes them deserve to be in there? Are they retarded or really psychotic or something?”  
“Well, I also heard they were powering the hospital. And Dr. Splinter wants them in there because he wants to make them suffer.”  
“You can’t be serious.” He looked skeptical now. “Are you crazy? No one can do that. This hospital is weird, but not that weird. I wouldn’t think they would…”  
“Well, the only thing we can do is open that door and find out then, hm?” He was trying to challenge him now. Maybe he could get Knuckles to help convince the other patients of this other world beneath the hospital. And maybe Knuckles would then believe him and help him too.  
“We can’t though. That door is reinforced. The only way we can open it is with the staff member’s keys. And I am not going to be stuck in here for another month. We can get in big trouble if we’re found fiddling with those keys.”  
“Oh come on Knux, aren’t you even a little curious to find out what goes on in there? Maybe we can even find out something about this hospital, something they’re doing wrong, and like sue them or something! And then we can get out! And I’ll be back in my life and you can be back with your wife and kid. How does that sound? Am I convincing you to do this?”

He was thinking it over. If they could find out if they were torturing those patients or doing something more inhumane than locking them in there for such a long time with no windows or any chance to let them outside, then they could sue this hospital for every last penny it made and they would be let go. It was a good idea, and if this could possibly let him see his family again he was willing to do it.

“Alright. I’ll do it. Maybe we can work together to see that ward. But if we get stuck in here longer or get punished, you owe me.”  
“Owe you what?”  
He thought Sonic wouldn’t even take his comment seriously. He mulled it over as to what he could possibly give him. “Well…do you have any loose change? Any interesting books? A sweatshirt even?”  
Damn it. If this possibly backfired, he would have to be freezing in this hospital. But if he wanted to gain his trust, he would have to make this deal. It was important to gain any of these patients’ trust, so he could lead them to bring down Dr. Splinter. He would have to remind himself that this would all pay off in the end. “Fine. I’ll give you a dollar and my hoodie. That should keep you warm in here and that would be enough for two phone calls for your wife and kid. Fair enough?”  
He smiled. “It’s a deal then.”

And they shook hands. Knuckles didn’t expect himself to find a friend in this hospital. But whatever would get him to not go insane in here was a nice change.

And Sonic had to make sure he wouldn’t go insane. He would have to bring him back to the cliff, no matter how deep he’s fallen.

“Sonic, Knuckles, you can’t be close to that door! It’s lunch now, so please come back to the dayroom.”

“I hate it when they treat us like children here,” Knuckles spat. “At least maybe lunch won’t suck. Breakfast sucked so much that I’m starving.”  
“Me too. Maybe we can get a table for ourselves and we can talk about how much this hospital sucks.”  
“Way ahead of you.”

It’s been a while since Sonic had actually made any friends, even outside of the hospital. But he memorized on how nice it felt. Maybe once they got out they could still be good friends. But for now, he was considered an ally. A fellow rebel. A soldier to bring down the King of Spades. 

He wondered how all his allies would fare in Wonderland. It was going to be a chore to make them all get along and fight for each other. But maybe he could teach them that having friends was nice. And that working together to get out of this hospital was even nicer.


	6. Letters Between Sonic and Josephine 1

Josephine held the letter close to her, written in big, scrawled red letters chiseled from crayons. She knew he had to write these letters with crayons sometimes. The hospital never allowed him to write with even a pen. She turned on her desk lamp and read it, the words shining from the wax.

Dear Josephine,

I was only in that hospital for four days and they decided to admit me into Wonderland State Hospital. And you know how long they can stick me in there? For a year! And I’m sorry Josephine baby, but I can’t see you in those six months. “Hospital policy,” they said. Well, screw that. The best I can do for you in these six months is write you a letter, so you know what’s going on in here. They said you can write me a letter back, as long as you don’t stick razor blades or drugs in these pages, but for Christ’s sake, do they think anyone is really going to do that? They even checked a letter a patient named Amy got from her grandparents, and I mean her grandparents, thinking they were going to try to send her some crack or something. This hospital, I swear.

Here’s what happened: they said I was in some kind of psychotic daze or something, and I grew paranoid and stabbed a nurse in the neck with her own needle. I don’t know what her condition is in the hospital, as they never mentioned it to me, but she’s alive. And I don’t know why I did it either, if I did do it. They finally cleaned my shoes of the blood from her neck that spilled. But…apparently in another psychotic daze…I smashed something in the hospital and slashed my wrists. To be honest, I don’t know why I did this. I don’t even remember it.

But I made a new friend named Knuckles. He’s a little like me in a way. He was admitted here because he wanted to escape for a while, you know, for his wife and kid. But then the main doctor here, Dr. Splinter (who’s a really weird guy that even you wouldn’t like once you came down here and saw him, and I know how hard it is for you to even dislike anyone) said he had to stay here for two weeks. And then it turned into a month, another month, and then he’s been in here for about 10 months and still hasn’t seen his wife and kid, and he gets pissed off about that every day. He just seems to have some kind of temper, but otherwise, he’s okay. I think we’re going to get along.

The crayon then turned green. She assumed the red crayon he was using became too short to write with.

This hospital is pretty hideous though. Those dark green and white walls…and the colored doors and everything. You wouldn’t believe it Josephine; it’s just an avalanche of ugly. At least Austin Lakes had some kind of style in it, you know? With the yellow walls and those nice little paintings you saw, right? Well it’s just puke green you’re greeted with each day you wake up and those fucking dot paintings I said I hated when we went to that art museum. Remember when I called Jackson Pollock a talentless hack? Well, he is. He can’t paint. He just somehow got popular because everyone just likes his bullshit all over the place. Art is nothing but bullshit to me Josephine, ever since Andy Warhol basically ground it down to nothing but meaninglessness and made it as obnoxious as possible. But I failed art in middle school and never want to take it again. They always had us do that pop art crap and I said no. But then I just made an entire canvas red and said that was my piece. The art teacher gave me a D-, but it was still passing. It was still considered art. Andy Warhol would’ve ate that shit up, and sorry to use this kind of language Josephine baby, but he’s a cocksucker.

I don’t know why I went off-topic Josephine babe, but there’s really not much for me to talk about, especially that I’ve only been in this hospital for about two days and I’m probably in here for months, so it’s going to seem like forever. But I miss you dearly throughout all these days. The only one I can really talk to is Knuckles, but I’m going to try to do what you would usually do and make friends with everyone. It’s a part of my therapy. And maybe if they realize I’m better I’ll be out in no time. But this Dr. Splinter likes to keep people in here for a long time I heard, but he’s pretty much a big fat creep that likes to draw weird things every day, like probably looking at the female patients in here and draw their boobs. At least his art is way better than Andy Warhol’s.

Also, a friend of mine wanted to ask you this…where do the ducks go when it’s winter? Do you know? Apparently he’s really curious about where the ducks go when the pond is frozen over. I told him they go to the south, but he doesn’t believe me. He believes they go somewhere else. He tells me near the hospital. I don’t know why he would be saying this really. But…maybe next time I’ll tell you about the secrets this hospital has. I’ve heard strange things coming from the other patients, and maybe this place has some big secret. Maybe if you believe me and want to listen, I’ll tell you, and my place within that place. But you’ll probably think that I’m psychotic again.

Anyways, this crayon is becoming a stub now, and they still won’t give me a good-sized pencil to write with. I hope you’ll write back soon Josephine, and hey, maybe if I do get out any time soon, how about you and me go out to a Texas roadhouse and get some steaks or something? I got some money left over from my dad’s mill, maybe we can go out sometime, and getting out of here would definitely be a celebration for me.

Love,

Sonic

P.S. I called my mother and she’s going to send you some flowers soon. Don’t worry, I let her use my credit card, so it’s all on me. I love you.

She was disappointed that Sonic was in the hospital for a much longer time. But these weren’t the only times she saw Sonic act out. Maybe it was right for him to be in a hospital, but a state hospital? It seemed too much to her. But she found several things wrong with him that she tried to tell his father, but he never believed it. He said to her, “He may not be the most perfect worker or the most perfect son, but God blessed be, he ain’t mentally ill! No son of mine is a cottonpickin’ loony in my mill and family!” 

She discussed it with his mother too, and while she didn’t seem so adamant about it, she also didn’t believe her.

There was yet another thing she noticed about Sonic, but she didn’t want to think about it right now and point fingers at him. She had to be supportive. She couldn’t even imagine being in a hospital for six months and not even see her family and friends or even request to go outside. Maybe his first hospital visit wasn’t such a bad idea, he probably didn’t deserve to be in such a high-security hospital as Wonderland. She heard that even the criminally insane went there sometimes. And what Sonic said about Dr. Splinter definitely made him seem like such an oddity. Maybe once you’ve dealt with these crazy patients all your life you even became a little crazy too, as if it was the norm.

But maybe Sonic was lying again, and that Wonderland was actually a very nice place. She thought Sonic lied to her constantly about things. That was his nature. Some liars are born inherently, and you had to carefully pick them out. Some of those words from Sonic’s mouth are lies. And I have to carefully pick those too. Like rotten fruit that don’t need to be in the orchard anymore.

She clicked her pen, and began to write in notebook paper.

Dear Sonic,

I’m very sorry to hear you’ll be admitted even longer. But I thought you being in a hospital wasn’t such a bad idea. I’ve seen you act out before. Remember when you were a child, and you actually thought walking out in the middle of the busy highway in Dallas was a good idea to get yourself killed simply because your father questioned you about something? Don’t get me wrong, your father is a little strict, but even as a boy you should’ve known that wasn’t a good idea. And you almost died doing that you know! Your father felt bad about that for days and your mother cried. And then there was you telling me that one time you bit your teacher until she bled and you began to cry for some reason, and sometimes you talk so fast that I can barely keep up with your words. I don’t think you need to be admitted in a state ward, sure, but I told you that maybe this was the best thing for you. You told me about how your mind was just blowing so fast for you that it nearly swept you off your feet, right? That’s how you worded it. And I worry about you sometimes. I worry that you’re going to do stupid things a lot. And please, please, please don’t slice your wrists again Sonic. That was a very stupid thing for you to do! And you should’ve told me about how you felt about it! I told you to show your feelings more Sonic. If you bottled them up all the time, it’s no use. You’ll just be like this again. Please do what the staff tells you to do and get better, alright? For me? Please tell me that in your next letter.

It’s good you’re making friends, dear. I would say to make friends with the staff too. Make friends with even Dr. Splinter if you have to. Ever since you were a child you…didn’t had very many friends. I’m not sure why, Sonic. You seem to have those traits that popular kids seem to have, yes? And you like to be alone all the time, sitting with your uncontrollable thoughts you shouldn’t be listening to! Even you’re cold to me sometimes. Please warm up. Please warm up to everyone around you. Maybe once you make friends you’ll realize how nice it feels and continue to keep making them. I mean, you’re funny and a joy to be around, and you’re telling me you can’t make friends! This Knuckles person sounds like he’s nice though, even if he is in a state ward. He has a wife and child? Well, hopefully he gets better too. It will be nice to see both of you get better. I will be very happy to see that. Maybe once I get to see you you’ll have to let me visit Knuckles. Six months is a very long time Sonic, but I’m willing to wait for that long. Maybe you’ll get better in that time.

Hospitals are always ugly Sonic. Even if they were all white it just means that everyone there is dead and they’re just using the colors to blanket all that dark stuff. I’ve heard that dark green means sickness, right? This hospital is basically telling you that you’re sick, and you are, Sonic. Whether you want to believe that or not. And please don’t use that language when we write another letter. You know I don’t like seeing those words here, and I don’t like Andy Warhol either, but that didn’t mean you had to give a rant on him. I remember when we were in that art museum and you made a scene every time we saw those paintings! You said that all those artists were hacks and that this was all nothing but a mockery this museum was showing. But I don’t remember you being this vocal about art. I remembered you didn’t very much care for it in your sophomore and freshman years. What happened that made you care so much? This is quite a strange transformation you made Sonic. And again, maybe this is why you’re in the hospital, like maybe you switched personalities, though I’m not going to accuse you of having multiple personalities. I don’t really believe much in that anyways. Sybil claimed to have it and she didn’t, and she was just oh so convincing.

By the way, did I ever tell you that one of my aunts was in a hospital like yours? It was for depression. She got shock therapy a few times and she was good as new afterwards. But I’m not sure if that’s the route we need to go with you. But it could work.

And this Dr. Splinter? He seems very odd. Maybe that’s what happens when he’s with strange people all the time. You must tell me about the other patients Sonic. What are they like? Why are they here? Of course, I don’t want to poke my nose in their business, but if you shared in their pain, it could make you closer to people and recover a little more from your illness. But I’m sorry about the female patients having to deal with him, but I’m sure he got the job for a good reason, right? I’m sure it’s not because this hospital is hiding some dark secret like you’re saying now. I don’t really believe you. Your head is probably making things up again. Please talk about this with your doctors. You need to open up again. I’m sure once you do that, you’ll get better.

And honey, why are you asking that question? The ducks fly south for the winter. It doesn’t snow very much here you know. It’s plenty warm for the ducks most of the time. Your friend is a little…peculiar for asking that question, but it isn’t wrong to be curious about little things like that. Is there a library in your hospital? Maybe if he looked it up in there, he would know. Who’s your other friend anyways? You didn’t introduce me to him, I’m afraid. I hope you’re being serious and not pulling my leg, so to speak.

And I would love to, Sonic. But you need to stay there for a little while. It’s for your own good, as they would say. But thank you for giving me the flowers. Please remember that I will always love you too. I can’t wait to see your mother again, and to get another letter from you. Please write to me again when you get used to the hospital and make a few more friends. But I’m sure this Dr. Splinter just wants to help his patients, so that’s why he made Wonderland. I’ve seen many patients come out of there with such a smile on their face they fit right in with us. You’ll come out soon, I promise. Please take your medicine when they give it to you and…I know I may be treating you like you were that young boy out in the highway again, but be a good boy, okay? Please. Don’t hurt yourself again.

I love you.

Josephine

She bit her lip a little as she realized she lied to him. She was becoming a little rotted fruit herself. She rarely heard stories about a patient in Wonderland getting out, and usually they were moved somewhere else in the ward until they died somehow of suffocation and sudden heart failure. When she told one of the nurses in the hospital she worked in, she said Wonderland was the worst hospital in Texas, never seeming to clean up the piss stains out of the floor and most patients that were ever admitted never got out. They would die, or they suddenly became vegetables. 

“But they just made a new ward for the adult patients that are one of the best sections that the patients could ever ask for! My boyfriend Sonic is in that ward, and I’m very sure he’ll be out in a few months. I’ve heard good things about Dr. Splinter too. I’m sure he’ll be okay in there.”  
“Yeah, good luck on that. I don’t know much about the new section, but I’m pretty sure he ain’t gonna get out any time soon. I had a friend work in there once. It’s absolutely awful, and I’m sure as hell once Sonic, even if he does get out, is going to be a changed hog all right. Completely different. Probably scared out of his damn mind.”

She walked away in those clogs hitting the floor so fast, rolling the silver cart away. She stood there as many people walked past her, suddenly still, suddenly lost in her own thoughts that were drowning her, plunging her into a part of her mind she never wanted to see.  
But she couldn’t feel those emotions. Not anymore. She knew how dangerous they could be.

So she smiled a twisted smile, seemingly satisfied with her answer, as she prepared to do another patient’s vitals.  
Maybe she’ll never get out of this torrent her dark mind held. As her love may never get out of Wonderland. They were all trapped, in some kind of labyrinth, and she might as well have let her love bleed. She might as well have let him suffer. She wondered if there was no use for him. That he was as gone as she was. But she continued that twisted smile and put those thoughts away.

Hello, I’m Josephine, girlfriend of Sonic, and I’m happy today. He’s going to get better and it’ll be a joyous occasion for all of us. We’re going to go out for steak soon! Isn’t that swell?

Her clogs made a noise in the hall as well, drowned out by the beeps the machines made with the dying patients, breathing out their final breaths. She wondered if they were all going to Hell. Because she certainly was.


	7. Blaze's Story, The Death Machine

She sat in the green leather seat, running her fingers all along it, with no thought on how nice it felt to her fingertips. She was thinking of something else. Something else that wasn’t comforting, but dreadful. If only leather comforted her. But the thoughts ran along her head, messy blurs that seeped out of her eyes as she cried about these memories that would be the death of her. She wished she could forget everything. Even her name and her birthday. She wanted to start a new life on a new parchment, with no memories embedded in it. It had to be completely clean of anything, unlike this leather seat, which had writings from the other patients writing their phone numbers and random curses that she blushed every time her eyes scanned them. She never liked to use those types of words, ever since her mother taught her that it was bad karma. Back when she was still alive.

She remembered all the days where she ran in the streets, until she thought her legs would’ve become bloody limbs falling from her knees, running from something that haunted her, running from her very past, and people would look as she ran past them, wondering why she was running, but only she knew. She assumed she was the only one who had her past with this lecherous monster who would suck her until she was nothing but a deflated body, even the marrow in her bones consumed.

Her mother died since she was ten, and although she remembered of her talking about bad karma and ridding oneself of evil spirits and doing her fortune readings, she didn’t see much of her and therefore didn’t remember her too much. She remembered her mother was a mother who at least tried. She could tell she cared. But there was something that was making her not try hard enough. She would’ve forgiven her completely if she didn’t know she was destroying herself.

Her mother was diagnosed with Type I Diabetes, very shortly after she turned eight. Her mother at first was positive that she would take care of herself. She ate healthy meals while she continued to do palm readings and taking her insulin. But eventually, those days went by with a sudden transformation, like a face that suddenly became so hideous she wanted to smash it with something until it was only masked by blood. It was then that her mother began drinking.

She remembered those days more than she remembered her mother back when she was a much smaller child. She screamed at her to not disturb her brother from her college work with her loud music or else she’d beat her ass black and blue. When her mother was drunk, she always favored her brother over her. Simply because he was going to college to become a physician. While Blaze was “simply going to be a nobody but a slut and whore who would have so many children to feed and she would start running over so many damn dogs just to feed them with dog meat like the goddamn Chinese”. She raved nonsensically about her deadbeat father who never paid his child support on time and how her children were becoming hungry and she worked so hard to just even give them a single morsel, when she began to no longer do her fortune telling. She would lie in bed, telling Blaze and her brother that she was sick with a terrible headache, and she had to take prescription pain medicine from her doctor just to make them go away.

Her brother was able to sneak in the Percocet for her. She would get a bottle with 60 pills inside and it would become empty in a week. She couldn’t count how many pills she took everyday. And there were times where she thought her mother finally died, because she would go through a deep sleep where not even the sounds of her brother screaming at her would wake her up.

But she knew it would happen someday. And she knew she would be completely powerless to stop it.

Her brother was named Smoke. Her mother had a weird baby book to name him that. She always envied him since she was four, as he was the much older, much more talented sibling that had more things going for him. He was smart, handsome, with his silky silver fur and his moon gray eyes, and he passed all of his classes with solid As and was also quite skilled musically as he played the piano for all of her family in all their reunions. As she listened to his haunting melodies, she always wondered when she would have something going for her. She was always teased in school. The only class she did well in was math, simply because she always liked numbers since she was small. But never enough to do anything extraordinary with them. She wished she was good with the piano too. She loved music, and she loved her brother’s plays. But yet when she offered to be taught by him, he simply said he didn’t want to hear her jamming on the keys and making his ears bleed for a month. After that, she never asked him again.

After her mother died, there was nothing left to do but to have her brother take an internship and feed themselves. She wasn’t sure where her father was during all this. After her mother died, she never heard from him again. Maybe he suddenly died too. She couldn’t think he simply wanted nothing to do with them. Her brother was going to be a successful doctor that you really wanted to be related to, after all. But she knew no one wanted to be related to her, so it made her father disappear. And when she wondered where he went, she began to hate herself and her stomach and heart would retch at the very sight of her appearance in the mirror, her very voice, her very personality. She hated the one thing that made her sane. Her dreams of becoming something were breaking down, and hate was the only answer, the only solution, she could come up with.  
Her brother also thought that was the very solution as well. The truth was even if she envied her brother; their very relationship was tied with hatred.

Her brother was the head of the household now, and whenever she seemed to “act up” or annoy him in any way, she was locked in the dark closet, and he would lock the door. And no matter how much she banged on the door and told him that this was wrong, he wouldn’t let her out until many hours have passed, until she was hungry and she held her bladder for so long she thought it would simply explode if she didn’t relieve herself in the bathroom. As the hours became longer at his job and the more he got annoyed, the more hours she stayed in the closet. Sometimes when she got too loud with her protests he would play the piano, the keys making their loud discordant notes as he screamed over them, “I can’t hear you Blaze! Playing the piano is such tough work out here! Can’t you see how much I’ve been practicing lately!”

And the room was filled with noise, a terrible racket caused by the keys of the piano, the very thing she loved and wanted to play like her older brother, and for it to be used against her like that, she could only break down and cry.

She went through years of his abuse. She was very malnourished and was close to contracting scurvy. Her gums bled and her health was dismal. She thought she couldn’t go through this life anymore, with all the children teasing her of her disgusting teeth, missing school so much because of her brother. She was close to being expelled, and there was truly nothing in life she was happy about anymore. All of the joys of life completely disappeared. Everything became gray and black. At least when her mother was with her she experienced some joy, usually with getting some extra money and being able to spend it on luxuries they usually couldn’t spend on, such as going out and something nice and fancy like a computer, but it was always for her brother. Smoke the fucking asshole bastard. She hated him now. She dreamed so many times that she wanted to end his life completely. She wished she could take a gun and shoot him as many times as she wanted, with his skull completely blasted through and his head becoming strawberry jelly. And she could run, forget about it, and the police would never find out who committed the murder, and she could run off in another country and live a new life by herself. She quite liked France. She wouldn’t mind escaping to France after she murdered him.

But it was never going to happen. She never had the damn courage to even punch him.

But she looked at herself in the mirror again. She really was disgusting. Her fur was grimy and dense, stuck together in patches, her mouth was bleeding and her teeth were probably going to get holes drilled in them due to how much she couldn’t even brush them, her eyes looked dead and weary, and underneath that fur, there were cuts on her arms, as she tried to escape, but reality was very real to her, and she couldn’t run away. No matter how deep she cut. She could never cut deep enough to kill herself.

But her mother still left a full bottle of Percocet before she died. 

What a painless and comfortable death. And her brother would find her dead body and be sorry for everything he did, and maybe the bastard would kill himself too, or he could be arrested and they would throw him in jail for the rest of his life.

So much she wanted his brother to suffer. And maybe the only way to make him suffer would be committing suicide, and leaving a suicide note that her brother abused her and caused her to do this. The police wouldn’t even question it. The dead always told the truth. And her brother could get raped in prison and she could feel everything she felt. And she would be able to escape from this awful life and into heaven. God would surely take her. And maybe she could find her mother. Even if she was an alcoholic on her last days, she would forgive her, and they would be a happy family again, and she would learn that her brother wasn’t the perfect little angel she thought he was.

She took the entire bottle, and locked herself in the closet, quickly writing the message before she could feel her life fading away from her body. She was shaky and her heart shook as well and she sweat and felt like puking, but she finished her letter, and covered herself with her coat and fell into a deep sleep.

World,

My name is Blaze. I was a good girl before. I had good grades. Well, in Math, anyways. And I had a mother who cared for me and my brother before she had type I diabetes and succumbed to a coma due to her alcoholism. My brother became the main caretaker after that. My father is dead to me, and my brother refused to send me away to a foster home, because he told me they were cruel and wouldn’t treat me right and he was afraid of his little sister to be not treated like a princess. But the truth was that I would rather be in a foster home than here. 

I hate my brother.

He treated me like dirt.

He locks me in the closet for very long hours, so much that I began to miss school because he wouldn’t let me out when the bus came. He would starve me and play sick little games for me to get the food, like if I kept my grades up I would be able to get a small meal because he didn’t want me to be a “porker”. And he said if I got enough bad grades he would play a game where he would try to chop off a body part of mine. I won those games, or well, I tricked him every time that I would call the police every time I found a phone, but I never did. I was too afraid on what would happen if I was in a foster home. I thought it would be much worse, so I never dialed 911. I would always land on 9, but never on the 1s. And my brother always convinced me he would change and not hurt me anymore. He was my brother. He was my own blood and skin. And I believed him. Every time.

And I cannot talk about this too much, but…he handcuffed me and played out his…fantasies. I puke every time I think about this. I wished you can see my dead body, and realize how much pain my brother has caused me. I wished my brother would get punished for everything he did, and truly, I hated him for everything he did. He cannot change for who he is. He is sick, twisted, and I do not know why my family loved him over me. Please punish him. Please. It is my dying wish. I wish for you to put him in prison for a long, long time. 

I am dead now. But you can still fulfill my wish. I committed suicide because of the pain my brother dealt to me. Please put him away before he deals any other woman this pain as well. 

Help me, my brain is breaking  
It is filled with faulty disillusions  
As I plan out my escape  
The taste of freedom from my torture  
Tastes so sweet to my vile tongue  
That I wonder if I’ll be able to see the light from the other side of the door  
Until it closes  
For good

Help me, my body is breaking  
My organs are dissolving away, and I feel dead inside  
Everything is numb to my touch  
And even my vile tongue  
Cannot taste the sunlight  
But with my brain broken in colorful pieces  
I can’t express sadness at this  
Only nothing  
As my body

Will

Melt

Into

Slob

For 

The Pigs

To eat for supper

Help me, my heart is breaking  
It is nothing but scarred tissue  
And becoming as black as a rotting carcass  
Without my heart  
I am  
Blind  
Without my heart I am  
Deaf  
To all the joyful sensations  
This world used to give me  
But with death  
Comes another death  
Ash to ash  
Dust to dust

My mind

My body

My heart

My soul

They are nothing

But broken toys  
To the mighty hands of God  
And he can’t wind me up again

And she closed her eyes. The final thing she saw before she died was darkness, and leather coats. It was funny actually. No matter how many of these leather coats she could wear, she would always be cold, as her insides rotted and as her body and mind broke away.

Help me my soul…is breaking. Help me my soul…is breaking.

\---

Her eyes hazily looked up to the frosty ceiling lights as they brightened up this place. She thought it was heaven. Heaven was going to make her do a checkup before she was reunited with her mother. And this man that was talking to her, whatever he was saying, he was God, and he was going to let her free. She was going to be a soldier who was going to march in heaven’s lines, preventing people like her brother from torturing poor women like her ever again. And she was going to make sure they would suffer. She would make sure they puked blood, locusts would eat all their food, and frogs would rain from the sky, and make their family dead. Was that going too far? God went too far a couple of times, but he still made his point. Sometimes going too far was the only way to get your message across.

“Blaze…Blaze, wake up. I see that you’re conscious now. You overdosed on your mother’s old medication and you were in a coma for two days…”

She was only in a coma! She wasn’t dead; she was still alive in this shitty world and her shitty brother torturing her! Why the hell did they bring her back to life? She knew she should’ve signed a Do Not Resuscitate Order! If she was dead, she would be up in heaven drinking lemonade with her mother and grandma in small Dixie cups and listening to Elvis tunes and listening to Chris Farley’s jokes…But she had to face Reality again. Even if it was ugly and staring at her stone cold in the face.

“Blaze, don’t worry about your brother. We’ve read your suicide note and your brother is now detained in Travis State Jail. You won’t be abused anymore. It’s over.”

Even the news couldn’t bring her to smile. Her brother was gone. There was that at least. But yet she wanted to die and go up to heaven, just to see what it was like. And she stared at the arctic lights and watched the green images being burned into her eyeballs flashing all over the hospital. It was the only way she could pass the time, as the doctors have strapped her to the bed with harnesses. Just stare at the lights and watch the green glowing splotches of color that danced in her eyeballs fade away.

What seemed to be hours later, the doctor came back with an even stranger doctor, one that didn’t even look like a doctor at all. He had red sideburns, a pale freckled face, had a shining bald head that was reflecting the lights in the hospital’s ceilings, and wore a t-shirt with a tie. Even she thought that was ridiculous to come to your job in. You either wore a tie with a suit or forget you even had the thing to start with. You didn’t wear it with a t-shirt, and she thought even staring at this weird man was going to make her mad.

“Blaze, this is Dr. Splinter. He’s reviewed your case and found out that you have clinical depression, plus Post Traumatic Stress Disorder on account of the abuse you’ve suffered with your brother, and we want you to deal with these emotional issues before we leave you to foster care. So we’ll be sending you to a state hospital called Wonderland State. Your suicide was very serious Blaze, and I believe Dr. Splinter may be able to help you. Even if you’re not willing to go Blaze, the court orders you to at least spend 72 hours in a psychiatric facility due to your suicide attempt. For now I’ll leave things up to Dr. Splinter to handle. He’s a very good doctor Blaze, one you’ll be sure to count on during your stay at Wonderland.”

The doctor left before she could protest. Dr. Splinter and the medics began to move her hospital bed before she could even say anything. Everything was moving so fast for her, as the doctors and nurses waved goodbye as if she was about to embark on a voyage to a different world, a different space that no human has ever discovered. She was Christopher Columbus now, finding new territory that no human has found before: an even madder mind. A madder mind that Blaze couldn’t even fathom. It was a new world inside her mind, and before she could scream on the trip, Dr. Splinter put a rubber piece in her mouth and told her to “be quiet dearie, or else you’ll cause a hard time for the paramedics, and we don’t want that, do we? So just keep your mouth shut for us, hmm?”

He was a real creep, but no one could top her brother. No one.

\---

 

The pigs for the slaughter went out to eat their dinner. It looked like slob, of course, but the blue quilled pig knew he didn’t have much of a choice, or else he’d be dead before he ever got out of this hospital. Meatloaf and mashed potatoes and gravy. Such ugly slop. The meatloaf bled with gravy and the potatoes were a tinge of yellow from some kind of foreign substance. But he ate anyways, even if he thought there were things inside this food. Maybe there were microchips that will track your very location to the staff. It was highly likely. Had to keep the pigs all in line, to wait their turn to the shock shop.

Sonic looked at the room that administered those shocks. Not many people really went inside, but once they did, they changed. He heard they still did lobotomies here. But it was 2009! Why would they still do lobotomies? Why would they still have the shock shop all set up, ready for new victims to swallow? Knuckles told him there was one patient who actually transferred to a different ward in the hospital after he was fried at the shock shop. Great big billowing clouds of smoke came from the door as they fried his brain like an egg, and the staff asked each other, “Sunny side up or scrambled? Better scramble his brains; he’ll be better off without it!”

There were three wards as far as he knew of: the Acutes, where he was settled in, the Chronics, who were usually people who were either moaning and pissing their pants and repeated their activities endlessly and people who have been in the hospital for three years, the door he was willing to open, and the Disturbed Ward. God he didn’t want to see the Disturbed Ward. He was lucky they never put him there when he sliced his wrists.

And he looked at his scars again. They were ugly, blistering, a deep gash that looked nearly purple, but he noticed they weren’t deep enough to kill him. He was close though. Very close. He might need stitches for them, and it was an ugly mark he would have to live with for the rest of his life. God Bless You Sonic, for making your life much worse than it already was.

Most of the Acutes were off in their own worlds. Bean and Bark were watching TV, which he noticed the only thing they could watch was an old man ranting about something, Blaze continued to rub her fingers all over the dark green leather seat with a faraway look in her eyes, Amy seemed to be writing a letter back to her grandparents, and Nack was in the far corner, listening to the radio, which was playing rock music that Sonic recognized was probably a TOOL song, seeming to sleep to the music as if it was a lullaby. Knuckles was nowhere to be found. Maybe he was throwing up after he was forced to eat all that slop.

Sonic gazed at the staff window again, seeing that they were talking and about to administer medicines. Fan-fucking-tastic. Just put the oddly colored pills in little paper cups and see if he could take them. It was about 8:00 at night which was probably medicine time. And he was prepared to fight this battle, even if he was lying on the dark green couch upside down, just staring at the golden lights and making his eyes see purple and green marks. He also imagined what it was like if the world was upside down. Maybe it was a better place. He was simply doing these things to pass the time. He never felt this bored in his life, where he stared at lights and watched as the little upside down folk walked along the ceiling.

“Hey Sonic, turn that frown upside down!”

He heard a voice, a distant, high-pitched voice that seemed to have come from the upside down world of Jubelair. Now these upside down folk were trying to communicate with him, and hopefully say to him they weren’t going to blast the little hospital to smithereens. But he reminded himself that he would actually like that.

“Hello Sonic!” His eye caught it. And he nearly gasped at how strange this little creature was. A black footed spider with six legs and only one eye, a blue eye that burrowed inside of him, and his mouth seemed to contain white gnarled teeth, as it grinned, or as he would say, “turning his frown upside down.”

His feet were black human feet that nearly squished whenever he moved them along. “How are you doing Sonic? Just sitting there on the couch looking at me? You need to go and do something else! No time to look at the strange and the unexplained. The explained is right there in front of you, and the explained is nice, isn’t it? The unexplained is scary. Better get back to your world, Sonic. This place isn’t for you.”

He wasn’t sure if he was hallucinating or this was one of the very fabrics made from the King of Spades. But he talked to it, as it seemed too real for him to ignore.  
“How do you know my name? What are you anyways? Where did you come from? You know it’s not common to see freaky things like you crawling all over these walls, but maybe it’s just the norm.”  
“Oh I know all about you, Sonic,” he replied. “I know about you discovering this world. And heed my words Sonic boy, this world isn’t as great as you think, and in fact you could get killed out there. So I’m warning you before you go Sonic ol’ boy, you better leave yourself out of this if you know what’s good for ya!”  
“Should I? I might as well make things interesting for me in this hospital, and I know what it’s really doing. I’m going to make sure this place burns to the ground, and you better tell your king that. I’m keeping my place as the leader of the Rebel Army, and it’s not much, but once we gather our numbers I’m going to kick your ass to kingdom come. So you better be prepared for it, freak.”  
“Oh, I’m so scared!” he taunted, shaking his coal-footed feet a little. “The King of Spades has more tricks than you can understand in your little head. He’s a great magician, one of the best, better than even Houdini! He’s going to play those cards right, and you’ll be sent to the shock shop faster than you can say ‘abra cadabra’! You’re dead meat, kid. Deader than the damn meatloaf we made you eat.”  
He smirked. “Think so, eh? Don’t worry; the Rebel Army is going to be like a newspaper swatting your ugly behind. We’re going to squash the King of Spades before he knows what’s coming, and don’t forget that, asslicker.”

“Sonic? Are you all right? You seem to be…mumbling to yourself.”

The ugly creature was gone. In his place was a staff member, holding onto those ugly colorful pills that were just as colorful as the doors in this place. “Are you seeing things? Who were you talking to?”  
“Oh, uh, nothing,” he said. “I was just making notes to myself. It’s how I think. I didn’t see anything. Nothing at all. Honest.”  
“Either way Sonic, I brought you your medicine. Dr. Splinter prescribed you Prozac and Lithium. Do you have any questions about the medicine?”  
“Yeah, what’s going to happen if I don’t take the shit?” he asked in earnest.  
“And why wouldn’t you take it Sonic? Dr. Splinter is trying to get your bipolar under control and you can’t leave this hospital until your moods are regulated.”  
“Ha! You guys don’t seem to understand that I’m not bipolar. Not unipolar, not tripolar, not any of that. I’m just as sane as Dr. Splinter. Well, I wouldn’t say that, cause Dr. Splinter is a weird case himself. Have you ever noticed all the weird things he would draw?”  
“We just think he likes to draw as a passing hobby Sonic. You need to take your medicine, or else you’ll end up on the Chronic Ward along with Amy soon. After all, you’re going to be treated here for a year, as your bipolar is very serious. Do you remember the cuts on your arms and what you did that made them?”  
“Wait a minute!” he screeched, the entire ward now facing him as the other staff tried to make them take their medicines. “I’m in here for a year? When the hell did that happen? I don’t think you understand lady, I got a life! I have to work at my father’s job at those fucking mills of his and I have to finish high school, and I have to…you can’t lock me up here for a damn year! You just can’t!”  
“I’m sorry Sonic, but it was reviewed by Dr. Splinter and all the other nurses that you had to stay here for that long to recover. Many of the other patients are in here for about six months, but your case is quite serious as you attempted suicide right in the group room and attacked a nurse at the other hospital. If you continue to not take your medicine for such a long time Sonic, you will be sent to the Chronic Ward and many of the patients there have stayed for many years because they refuse Dr. Splinter’s help. Now…”

“Damn it lady, I’m not taking your goddamn medicine! I’m not staying here for a year or getting sent to the Serious Degenerates Ward or fucking Chronics or whatever you call it! I’m going out to the great big blue Texas fucking sky and seeing my girlfriend and getting some goddamn steaks, and God willing, I’m going to get out whether Dr. Splint Dick likes it or not!”

Nack, who was hearing Sonic’s tirade over his rock music, actually managed to snicker over the name “Splint Dick”. Bean did too, as his fingers twitched and his eyes constantly shifted between Sonic and FOX News. When Bean went back to watching Bill O’Reilly, he noticed Bark wasn’t there with him on the seat, but actually with Sonic and the nurse.

Sonic felt a heavy hand holding his shoulder, as he looked up at the yellow bear that looked to be 6 feet tall and his head was going to hit the hospital’s ceilings any day now.

“It’s not worth it, Sonic. You don’t have to take the medicine, but just sit and calm down. There’s no helping us. We are nothing but the Souls of the Damned here. We all lost our lives, and there’s not much we can do to bring them back.”

Bark was saying to him that they were dead. They were gone. Their lives were taken away since they were admitted here. They were nothing but a faded memory. And Sonic had to get used to this, or else he would suffer forever in this afterlife.

“No…no, you don’t understand Bark…” His voice was heavy, choking and dismal, and he held his head in his hands. Bark knew what he was doing. The news that you were dead always hits you the hardest when you first hear it. He told it to himself every day now and he couldn’t feel even the slightest twinge of emotion.  
“I got a life…back home…with my father…and I was going to graduate high school…and…”

Bark and the nurse held him as he cried. He felt his knees shaking and he would’ve dropped immediately to the floor if they weren’t holding onto his shoulders like latches and screws. Everything Bark said to him was true. They were very much the Souls of the Damned. Never to see light in this hospital again. And even if he was chosen by Shadow to kill the King of Spades and get them out of here, his grief told him otherwise. He wasn’t a leader. He was a loser. A dead loser. He felt himself to be a failure in his life by every sense of the word, and he hated himself for it. If it weren’t for the nurses putting a careful watch on him as Bark carried him to his room and let him cry himself to another dreamless night, he probably would’ve tried to end his life again. Cut his throat as deep as he could, maybe until his head was completely off.

And he was sure that Dr. Splinter would’ve liked his head after he called him Splint Dick.

The sun hit his eyes, creating white shadows on the dark green walls. It was a change. He hated those walls. He hated them more than he hated this damn hospital. It was the color of greed and evil, which Splint Dick certainly was all those things.

Knuckles was out again, his bed sheets all in disarray. His wife probably always did his bed. He never did his bed since he came here. It was always a mess, and his shoes smelled all the way from here. His wife was probably tolerant. Too tolerant. He nearly gagged at the smell of fresh rotten feet in the morning.

But he had to keep his trust in him. Don’t want to say his room manners were the worst he’s seen since camp. His roommate back then pissed the bed. Then he felt sorry for Bark. It was probably what Bean did all the damn time. 

It was time for the pigs to eat their breakfast and attend group after that. This time they had a breakfast sandwich with that fake eggs shit and sausage and cheese. It didn’t taste so bad though. Which was a given.

He sat by Knuckles, who seemed to be eating his sandwich nearly with his mouth open. Yet another subtraction in his manners, but he had to go through with their plans first. Not something he should’ve learned when he was six.

“Knux, you still remember our plan, right? About going into the Chronics Ward and finding out what it’s like? How are we going to exactly steal the keys to that place?”  
“Didn’t that lady tell you if you didn’t take your medicine you would be in the Chronic Ward anyways? Why do you still want to go there that bad? I wouldn’t even try to do this if I didn’t want your sweatshirt so bad. It’s as cold as a snowman’s ass in here.”

Sonic laughed. It was the first time he laughed since he’s been in this hospital. At least Knuckles had a sense of humor sometimes.

“Well, I think I’m going to wear it today. You know how they’re going to be talking to us in group about our problems or whatever? Once you’re going on about your rant on how your sister molested you or something, and I’m going to pretend that this is going to trigger something or make me act ‘bipolar’ again, and I’m going to try to act out again and while they’re restraining me you come in and take their keys. It should be as easy as pie. You can give the keys to me if, you know, you’re slow or something.”  
“But how are you going to stop the staff? You better leave it to what we’re good in. I can fight off the staff and you can take it and run. But I’m not sure why you want to go into that ward so much Sonic. It’s just going to be an even worse sideshow than this, except the poor bastards probably don’t even get to eat real food except for scraps of dust on the floor.”

And Sonic thought he was probably right, but he wanted to prove to him that Wonderland existed. So he could join his cause, and get others to join the Rebel Army. It was the only way they were going to get out of here now.

They went into the group room, one by one, their hospital gowns blowing in the wind from the A/C that made them shiver and hold themselves for warmth. Colder than a snowman’s ass. He felt like he was in the snowman’s asshole. Couldn’t get any damn colder than that.

“Hello y’all.” Typical Southern drawl. For a second he forgot that this was central Texas. “We’ll be here today discussin’ plans you can utilize once you get out of this cottonpickin’ hospital. I’m sure that’s what you’re all thinking of, and if I were you I’d feel the same way. But y’all need to realize that you’re in this hospital for a reason. You’re in here because you’re sick with a mental disorder the doctor diagnosed you with. He’s a professional, so he knows these things. Let’s start things out with Bean. Bean, what did the doctor diagnose you with? Do ya know, and what can we do once you get out of here?”  
He twitched his fingers and kept shifting in his seat. Sonic thought seeing him do this constantly was irritating him. “He said I was a pyromaniac. And I have ADHD. I love fire man, I can’t help it! Me and my little buddies would make explosives and fireworks at home and man I love fire just love how it’s red and orange and oh that pretty blue it’s great fire is great she is a beautiful mistress and I never want to be away from her…”  
“Bean, pay attention to me,” she said, snapping her fingers. “You definitely seem to have that disorder. Now, what are we gonna do about your little predicament? Has the doctor made a plan just yet?”  
“Oh, well, he wanted me to take pills. But I like having energy. I like fire too much to take them. I don’t know what are in those pills anyways, like some kind of chemicals that make my mind on fire or something? I don’t want my brain on fire. That seems to be too much.”  
“And that there’s the problem. None of you seem to be taking the medication as prescribed. Dr. Splinter really does want you to get all better, and that’s why he’s prescribing you these pills. If these pills don’t work, just complain about it with us and we’ll switch you to a different one. The only one taking his medicine here is Bark, but we may switch him on something different because there seems to be no change at all since we prescribed him Zoloft. Bark, how are ya feeling today? Any better since Sonic went down hollerin’ on us all.”

He was quiet. Distant. He shuffled his hands together, his big hands that were nearly the size of his head, as Bark replied, “Yes. A little. I just hope Sonic won’t take it the wrong way. We’re all damned souls here. And Dr. Splinter is Cerberus, with his three heads that look out in all directions. Sonic, most of us have been here longer than six months, but…there’s not much you can do. There’s really not much we can all do. We’re all suffering here. We’re all mad here. We’re all dogs here. Nothing but filthy rotten dogs who don’t know how to sit and beg. That’s all there is to it.”  
“So I’m guessing yer depressed. That Zoloft hasn’t been doing anything, hasn’t it?”  
He shuffled his hands and feet again. Sonic didn’t know how he was getting cold. He was a polar bear, after all. “No. Medicine doesn’t really affect me very much. I was put on ADHD medicine by my mother before. It never did anything for me. I wasn’t numb or hyper or bored or anything. It just didn’t do anything.”  
“So we should just set you on a different medicine then, huh Bark? Something that’ll work, huh?”

The plan was initiating…now.

“This is fucking bullshit!” Knuckles rose abruptly, screaming so loud the dayroom outside heard him clearly. “We’re all here like dogs taking our medicine and expecting us to be good little boys, and you’re just saying we should just go and submit ourselves to that? That’s bullshit, all of you, and you know it!”  
“Knuckles how about you calm down before we get the staff in here. You know how it goes. You get a needle in your ass and you’re in here longer. It ain’t worth it buddy.”  
“Being in this damn hospital isn’t worth it! I want to see my family; I want to see my wife and kid, what the hell is wrong with you people, taking the whipping from these jackasses who don’t know a damn thing? Bark, you’re not depressed damn it! You’re just a regular kid. A big kid, but you aren’t depressed! God damn I’m just going to punch this damn wall and break this hospital apart!”

She reached for her walkie-talkie, signaling the stronger staff members to come in, ol’ knuckleboy was acting up again, and they always knew what to do. Needle full of Thorazine up the ass, and hours later he’ll be just fine and not know what happened here. As usual. Every day ol’ knuckleboy threw a fit, and he was surprised they weren’t running low on Thorazine because they used the damn shit everyday.

While the staff ran in, pinning Knuckles against the wall, Sonic quickly stood up, reached for the keys, took such a grip on them they might as well be joined with his hand he thought, and punched one of them in the neck, the large muscled man distracted enough to let Knuckles free. They both dashed out of the group room as if they were running from the tongues of the flames from Hell, and they dashed through the red door and was now in the hallway, next to the Safety Rooms and near the Chronics Ward door.

They were so close. They were so close to uncovering the secret; they nearly could taste it with their tongues that tasted so much filth that the hospital dared call “food”. And Sonic was excited to see this land for himself, the land with the dandelions and the sun and The End, that his hands were shaking, and the keys were jingling with a chank chank chank that it nearly made it into a damn Christmas song.

But the staff was going to make chase. They wouldn’t let him uncover this secret, as their precious castle would be gone if anyone knew The Truth. Sonic locked the hallway door, the staff banging on the windowpane with the black wire going through it and jingling through their keys to get it open. They were pissed now, and he knew it. He would be in this hospital longer, but he was going to be stuck here forever anyways. He knew that already.

He gazed at the keys. They were all different, as if they didn’t really belong in a mental hospital, but to a funhouse mirror in a carnival. There was a very tiny one, one as small as a pin, and he knew it wasn’t going to open the door. He wasn’t sure of what the key would ever open, being that small. There was a key that when he held it in his hand he realized it was large, bigger than his wrist, dirty and full of rust, and he wasn’t even sure of how the staff carried it around them without anyone noticing or it even fitting in their pockets without a slight bulge. It was a key from a garden shed that the gardeners would use, to keep their flower feed and lawn mowers and the seeds to grow those huge trees and a fence to keep those outsiders out and a key to keep them all outside of the gate to Wonderland with its perfect green grass and its yellow dandelions drifting in the shades of the purple trees and we would laugh and the trees would laugh too and say keep out you piece of shit you don’t belong here only the mad do and you wouldn’t want to be mad trust me you don’t or else you would think these fucking trees would talk.

And the other keys? They were spectrums of different colors, a deep dark blue that looked like the sea, a deep bright red that belonged to the flames of Hell, and a green that he thought would belong to his eyes, to the same color as emeralds, and they sparkled in the light, like they were constructed from gems, keys that were constructed and cut by jewelers to be used in a mental ward. The colors of the spectrum all laid out for him, and he knew they opened the specific doors. They responded to the right colored keys. That was probably why all the doors were color coded. Because they didn’t want the staff to get lost in this huge labyrinth. He found the black key, which was larger than the others, caressing it slowly with his fingers as if he couldn’t believe that this key was now in his hands, and he quickly stabbed the door knob to the black door before the staff would run towards him and keep him and Knuckles here for even longer than a year. But the door wouldn’t bleed, even if he turned it sideways and made its organs drip from its body. It wouldn’t open, even when Sonic slammed his body on it, and even with all of his force shoved against it it still wouldn’t budge. It felt like it was reinforced with nothing but steel and concrete. “Open damn it! This key fits in here, why won’t it fucking open!”

Sonic’s voice was crackling under this pressure. It was the kind of voice he heard when he was with his father, and he didn’t want to hear it again. Like father like son. He had his father’s eyes, his father’s fur, and his father’s rage, as he could feel like his fists were inflamed from slamming them against the door, as he shouted and begged for it to open, and he wished it would. He wished his father’s voice opened everything, because it certainly opened his fear, his disgust.

“What’s the holdup? Why won’t it open? Hurry up Sonic!” Knuckles said, ready to pound the door with his fists if he needed to. But he tried to open the door before. It wouldn’t even dent with his fists, unlike the other doors.  
“I’m trying! But the key won’t even open it! I don’t know what the hell is wrong with it!” He kicked it too, but his feet hurt from doing so. They stung as he continued to bash it, the door seemingly to laugh at him at his pathetic attempts.

Sonic at once heard a noise that was different than the door. And different than the footsteps from the staff. They were heavy, thumping and quaking footsteps. Heavy thuds that shook him to his very bones as he kept holding onto the silver knob. Thump thump. Thump thump.

Then he heard a voice. A stupid sounding voice, but it was a voice he never heard before. And a clink from something small rolling across the floor.

“This is how you can get in. I can’t read, so what does the note on the bottle say?”  
The small thing hit his feet, and rolled back, the hospital light shining on its turquoise glass. There was a large note attached to it, hidden by his sight. He bent down, picked it up, and saw that the bottle had some liquid inside of it, and he read the note.

DRINK ME.

“So I have to drink this to get inside?”  
“If you want in,” the stupid voice replied.

The voices and footsteps were drawing nearer, so he couldn’t even check if the liquid was hazardous. He took a sip, and let Knuckles take a sip too (told him that was how they could get in through the damn door, apparently), and Sonic stood near it for a while, expecting it to open or somehow become some kind of vortex, but nothing was happening. He thought a little on how the liquid tasted so strange, like some kind of cheesecake, tart, custard, buttery toast-kind of taste, and he wasn’t sure on how that was possible. “I don’t feel anything. Are you sure this is going to work?”

And in that instant, he felt himself changing. The doors to the Chronics Ward and the padded rooms were becoming bigger. The walls looked brighter to him, as if the dark green paint was now shining for him, the veins of the building overflowing with dark blood that made it function on its evil, as these little demons ran inside of its body, pulling the right switches and levers and making everyone who dared crawl inside it for some kind of promise of a “cure” to suffer, as it needed its own patients blood for its blood to flow, and the veins were black and rich, and they flowed to the brain of the King of Spades, and everything under this hell house began to breathe and he also would breathe as he functioned on insanity.

The floors were larger, the black and white pattern ready to swallow him whole, the black squares like ink that would suck him in, and the white like paste to make him invisible to the seeing eye, and as he shrunk into this little world, he lost all his senses. His sight. His touch. His taste. His smell. His hearing. He lost it all. And he was sucked into this world. Gulped into the giant’s throat, and everything was blackened.

This world was black, he could tell. He was still so small. There were dazzling dots in his vision, of so many colors, switching and changing in his vision, becoming different colors and changing much like a drunken chameleon. They were fuzzy, a Gaussian blur that his mind couldn’t determine whether he was staring at something purple that gazed back at him with viscous yellow black holes as eyes, and then he could feel it rotating it back into its own lines and shapes, and he could see a purple cat staring back at him, with his yellow eyes like round golden dollar coins, gazing back into his own confused green slits.

“Uhhh…Are you okay, blue cat? I’m sorry that I got you into this mess, blue cat, but you seemed to really want to be inside this place!”  
“Blue cat?” he asked, getting up slowly. “I don’t remember being a cat. But if you say so I guess I’m that. A blue cat.”  
“What are you talking about Sonic? Last I talked to you before this you told me you were a hedgehog, and you look like one to boot! Why would you say you’re a cat?”  
He looked at himself. This cat had thicker arms than him. Much thicker. He looked muscled. Even if he felt small the cat was much bigger than he was, but yet he wasn’t sure of what he himself was. A hedgehog? A cat? What the hell was the difference? He had a tail, two ears, two eyes, two hands, two feet, a nose, and fur and he had eyes that people thought would belong to a cat. But he didn’t know what the hell he was because his identity was mixed in his mind with all the other animals he met in his life. What was he really? A duck? A giraffe? An asshole? If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it was a duck. But did cats make noise? Did hedgehogs make noise? Who the hell knew? And he sat back in one of the hospital chairs as he gazed at the glowing colors beyond him, the long thin wire that shined in all the colors. ROY G. BIV. Who the hell was he? He owns all the colors, all of them, in the sky. And he held his head, waiting for the throbbing and thudding and crashing and smashing in his head to stop. 

“What do you mean? I’m not a hedgehog, am I? I’m…not exactly sure of what they look like. Are you sure I don’t look like you, whatever you are? Or Blaze, like a cat? Or Bean, like a duck? I’m…not sure. What the hell is going on here?”

Knuckles looked around the ward. It was covered in a thick veil of darkness. His eye couldn’t discern much from what seemed to be a cavern of a ward, but he thought he could see cicadas and cockroaches making their nests in the walls, stained with sticky long trails of something that reminded him of semen (did they even clean up this damn ward from the sex maniacs in here? He thought to himself) He could see a machine in the far corner of his knife-like eyes that cut through the blackness, and it extracted a long silky wire of colors that streamed like a river full of the ROY G. BIV fish. As he walked around in the hospital wing of the other patient’s rooms, seeing if anyone else were around the ward other than the purple cat who knew the English language (instead of the usual gurgling and moaning as their eyes looked bruised and swollen, as their mouths dripped of saliva and their tongues hung low, and they answered back in reply to Knuckles’ question, “Urrrrrgggghhhhh. Gaaaaaaaaaahhhhggggllle. Mougggghh.”)  
Possibly no one else but the purple cat was the only patient with sense in the ward, even if he looked to be retarded. It was ironic, to have a retarded person be smarter than everyone around him. 

And suddenly, the machine chimed and dinged, and out from one of the slots it popped out a meal of fried fish and milk, and the purple cat stared at it with glee, and shouted with joy.

“Oh boy, dinner! This machine always gives me exactly what I want! It’s simply the best!” And he ran towards it, with as much skip to his step as a five year old child given a new toy, and he bit into the fish, the blood slowly seeping from its scaly body.

Knuckles returned, searching everything in the ward, but yet finding no one else that knew of a few things other than the cat. He hoped there would be more, but there wasn’t. But you had to take what you could get. “The Chronics Ward is as serious as we thought Sonic. They don’t get any damn sunlight at all, there’s no staff here, and they’re fed through a machine! What in hell’s bells is this room?”

Sonic still couldn’t answer him. He felt lost, in a labyrinth of his own. His brain was muddled with confusion, doubt, and darkness seeping from this room he was in now.  
He wasn’t sure of who he was. He wasn’t even sure of his own name. Why was he called Sonic? There was nothing about him that seemed to tell him that that name fit. Just a wrong piece of the puzzle that somehow stuck in all the holes, and no one noticed that the picture was all wrong.

He could hear footsteps and drips in the distant hallways. He wondered how this cat could even get to place in place in here, or he actually evolved to see in through this darkness like some creatures who do live in caves, or they were simply like Knuckles who adjusted to this sort of thing since he was young. But there seemed to be another patient in this room that Knuckles missed even with his nocturnal eyes, as his footsteps resonated through the darkness, and Sonic couldn’t even see him until he got further to the machine, seeing a glimpse of blue eyes and yellow fur, picking up his meal from the machine. He looked melancholy and his face was permanently stitched in worry and fear and regret, even if the machine spat out his favorite food. Sonic and Knuckles could tell that the figure was a child, and he was probably in here for years, not outside playing in schoolyards like normal children.

“So who are you guys? Are there any more patients in this room? Or are you two the only ones here?” Knuckles asked.

The purple cat glanced at him with his golden saucer eyes that gleamed in the darkness. “My name’s Big. And this is Miles. No one else in here as far as I know of. I used to be in the Acute Ward until I moved up here, yup! It’s not so bad. I get to eat whatever I want and the darkness and lack of people is kind of relaxing.”  
“Well, I hate it,” the yellow child piped up. “I want to go back to my normal life, even if my parents are dead. I’ve been in here for two years, and I feel like my brain is rotting away and no one even knows my existence. Of course Big likes it here because he didn’t have very many friends at all…”  
“People were mean to me, and they said I should be in here. It’s not so bad though. But people are different. I’ve been in here for five years. We’re just called Serious Degenerates, or Chronics, whatever that word means.”  
“So you’ve been in here for a really long time? Jesus, and they were considering making that girl Amy a Chronic. Would be really sad if she ended up here like you guys, sorry to say.”  
“How did you even get in here?” Miles asked, impassive. As he got closer to the light, Knuckles could tell that he was a fox, with two tails mostly shadowed by the darkness. The light kept changing colors, kept flickering on the small fox, as his face continued to give that serious look, the look that told he’s been suffering for too long.

“We found a key, but it wouldn’t open this door. But then Big gave us this bottle full of this stuff with a really weird sweet taste, and…last thing I knew, we were in here, and Sonic’s been suddenly acting…distant.”

His mind was distant. His logic was distant. Everything that made sense to him was distant. He was losing himself, so suddenly, ever since he drank that bottle. He felt himself getting smaller, he felt his mind suddenly shrinking into that perpetual darkness, and before he knew it, he was getting closer to The End that his nose nearly touched the black voids of insanity, and he felt himself being welcomed by that vacuum that was trying to usher him off the cliff and into the deep dank depths that had no bottom. And even if he knew it was a terrifying place, he thought this world and confusion he was in now made The End such a comforting land.

He looked at the pit, while the flowers and grass on that hill was becoming gray and black by the rainy cloud’s touch, and he wanted to jump. It would save him the torture he would go through if he was in here for so many years, forgetting everything about himself, losing everything in his life, that he really was ready to lose everything else, that became so wretched and abhorrent that the only thing left to do now, was jump.

Jump.

Jump damn you! Everything that is horrid and cruel will end if you just jump!

Jump.

He felt himself falling, his feet giving up the ground, and into the air, into the soothing darkness of The End, that suddenly, he felt a big, thick arm holding onto him, and he was stopped. He could still see The End, but he could now feel himself floating in mid-fall, and he wondered why he was here and who was making him stop. But if I jumped, everything would be better! Why are they halting me from going into this soft pale blue darkness that beckons me to lose all of who I am?

“This will do the trick. I’ve heard these cakes will make him go back to normal. I guess there’s some special medicine in it or something.” Big, unaware that Sonic was somewhere else in another place inside of his head, shoved the cake inside his mouth, his large hand nearly choking him as it covered his nose, gullet, and even his neck.

Sonic struggled to speak, trying to tell him that he wanted to go to The End and nothing was going to stop him, and he wasn’t going to eat this cake, no, he had no use for food anymore, why was he making him eat and trying to get him to miss life back on Earth? But Big’s meaty fingers moved throughout his face and made him chew, the lack of oxygen and the dissolving of his cake as he tasted the bitter medicine made something pop into his brain. His logic and sense came back, and he could remember his name, where he was born, who he was, why he was here, yes, everything about his life was coming back to him, and now he was growing back to his normal size, and Big and Knuckles and this fox who was all staring at him were a little smaller than they were.

They were giants when his brain suddenly fell and shattered.

Big let go, and Sonic swallowed, and he could breathe again.

“Where am I?” he gasped, as he swallowed deep gulps of air. “Are we here…in Wonderland?”  
“Wonderland? What are you talking about? We’re in the Chronics Ward Sonic, like you said we would be.”  
Miles’ eyes lit up, like blue flames on a stove. “Actually, I know what he’s talking about. There’s something…that the doctor is hiding from all of us. As you can see in this ward, this place isn’t really a hospital.”  
“Then what is it really?” Sonic asked.  
“This place is more like…one of those really vast gardens that the rich have. No, this is more like a zoo. And we’re all the animals, and there’s animals lying here who wish to meet us. No, this place is a zoo and a battleground. An entirely new land that this doctor made just for his own amusement. We aren’t patients. We’re simply his entertainers, except he doesn’t care if we suffer or if we die. We’re just actors, and I’m afraid this isn’t a silly sitcom we’re all playing in. This is really something that could mean life and death. And I’m powering that machine. So is Big. We actually powered a machine that killed so many of these actors. And I’ve done it for two years.”

He realized that those dreams he had with that black and red hedgehog named Shadow…they were all true. This hospital was simply a slaughterhouse where it had its grasslands and pastures for the “patients” to enjoy, but eventually, they were killed. Given a shock to the head, and the doctor might as well cook their meat on the grill in summertime and make his children eat it, saying it was the finest meat, and the children are simply oblivious to what it really was. That meat was actually a patient.

And he wanted to take Josephine out for steaks.

What a great joke you made, Sonic. Haha.

And he winced.


	8. Bean's Story, Entering Wonderland

A single flicker of the match. Some igniter fluid. Some gasoline. That was all it took to ignite this forest in a brilliant display of colors. Red, orange, yellow, and blue. The most beautiful colors that he ever saw. And every time he saw it, he always shivered at its greatness, no matter how much he sweat due to the heat.

Gasoline, matches, igniter fluid, those were all the ingredients to an orgasm. The entire forest was dressed in flames, and did it look oh so lovely this night. It was going to go on a date with the stars, but unfortunately, this dress was going to make her die.

He watched the flames from afar, drinking hot chocolate no matter how hot he was, even if it was summer and 83 degrees this night. He liked heating himself so much he would’ve burst to flames if he even drank that heated cocoa and sugar. While he finished the mug, still sweating that his forehead was completely moist, he thought of other places he could ignite with his flames, to make them pretty with fire and soot. The school he went to, where he was teased everyday. His job, where they didn’t give him the respect he deserved. His home, where he could show his mom and pop how much he was suffering. He could make a statement, putting all these places in this beautiful dress, like a mad fashion designer. Fire was synonymous with passion, anger, fury. He could show them how angry he was with them. And what better way was there than with fire.

He still sat on the patio, watching the flames devour everything in the forest, when his mother came back from work. And the first thing she paid attention to was the fire. And her son just watching everything burning down, with a mug in his hand, and a very faraway dreamy-like stare. Why was her son out here? Shouldn’t he be calling 911? People could die in this fire!

“Bean? Bean! Get down here right now! You should be calling the authorities, not have your head in the clouds! This fire is going to pass on to the people who live near the forest! You need to call 911 right away young man!”  
Rich people tend to live near the forest. Good. They needed a little misery. Fat greedy pigs. He said nothing.

“Bean? Bean! I said get down here! I mean it!”  
He continued to look at the colors, the lights dancing on the horizon. Still no answer.

He wasn’t going to listen. He was probably pouting by now. She knew how he acted. There were times where Bean tried to get away with everything by acting like a brat.  
She marched towards him, to give him a little speech that she knew he would whine and try to get away from. Not this time. People could die from this, and she knew she had to be serious for once. She didn’t care that he was a crybaby. She needed to tell him to get back in the house and actually be a responsible adult.

“Bean, you’re getting a lecture about this once we call the fire department young man! I mean it! You’re in big trouble!”

But still, he didn’t respond. She even laid her hand on his shoulder, and he continued to look out there, as if he was dead to the world.

“Do you…like fire, ma?”  
“Excuse me Bean? Why would you say such a thing? Of course I don’t like fire!” She bit her lip, to the point where it nearly bled. His voice sounded distant, and she was becoming afraid, her heart beating along with the dancing flames.  
“Fire is beautiful, isn’t it ma? It’s one of the most beautiful things I ever saw. And to create such a beautiful painting on this canvas, I can say for once I’m proud of myself ma. I’m proud of myself. Look at how the flames dance, how the colors mix, it’s such a wonderful art ma. I really should be getting an award for this. Fire is much like a living creature. It breathes, it eats, and it doesn’t know right from wrong. And I am proud to be giving birth to such a creature, ma. I really am.”  
“Bean?” Her grip tightened, and her lip was beginning to run a small pool of blood down her face. She didn’t notice it, but her palms sweat a little more than from the heat of the fire.   
“Are you telling me that…you started this fire? You’re the one burning down…this forest?”  
He faced her, smiling the biggest grin that she ever saw Bean give. All his life he never smiled like this. “Yeah ma, I’m the one. It’s pretty, isn’t it?”

The fire was put out by a team of firemen and fire trucks, after it burned down a house and a mansion. The wealthy man sued the family for two million dollars, and Bean faced a very hefty charge of arson, but his mother and lawyer pleaded that he wasn’t “very much right in the head since he was adopted”. Even his own adoptive mother admitted that, after the forest burned down. When he went up to the stand, he barely talked about what he was thinking of when he burst the forest into flames. He just talked about how wonderful fire was, and how new life would bloom in the forest thanks to him.

And while he waited on his verdict, he imagined the whole courtroom on fire, and how beautiful it would’ve looked. If only he had the ingredients. Matches, gasoline, and igniter fluid, and he would yet have another masterpiece. It would be so gorgeous the judge would have to acquit him and call him a genius and send him to a good school where he would be the most respected student in the whole building. And finally, he would be loved and accepted.

He was acquitted on the charge, but only because the jury believed he was insane. Well, madness was synonymous with brilliance. So it was very much like the same thing. He diagnosed himself with brilliance. The doctor who saw him said he could barely pay attention to him and seemed to have an “overpowering fetish for fire”, and diagnosed him as a pyromaniac. And he said the best place to put him in was “Wonderland State”. Maybe it was a place for a lot of brilliant and mentally ill minds like him. Maybe he would belong there. And it would be the only place he would ever belong in. In a house for lunatics. The doctors would be so impressed with his genius that after a few weeks he would be given a scholarship to go to a school that would accept him too. And that was all he really wanted. To be accepted. But it seemed like it was too hard to ask for.

It’s been months since that forest was on fire. And he didn’t belong here. He tried to get attention various times; because he felt so invisible he couldn’t help but cry about it a little at night. No one understood him, and no one seemed to care. He swore to the doctors he thought he was a mad genius, but they only laughed or sighed. He would make them believe. Oh, would he make them believe.

On the very first day he said he would find all the cleaning agents, make an explosive, and make this whole entire hospital explode and be dashed with fire.

He was restrained for hours that seemed like forever. They were extremely heavy restraints, brown and leather and they even covered his mouth as if they didn’t want to hear him talk, as if he was annoying and they told him to shut his damn mouth. All he could do at that moment was sleep, and cry a little, like he always did.

His mother and father…he couldn’t remember them. Shortly after he was born, they gave him up, suddenly disappeared, and he was put in foster care, without saying a single word to him. He thought his parents got tired of him. It was something he nearly thought about everyday.

And he lived in the foster care system nearly all his life, and nearly all his life, he didn’t belong. Many children in the foster care system made fun of him. The older ones often laughed on how naïve he was by the whole system. He thought he was going to be adopted every time someone came to learn about the children in the building. But even some of the children who were so pessimistic of the whole system, saying they were only puppies in a pet store with assholes that didn’t work right and had scum near their eyes, they were adopted. And he felt even more that he didn’t belong. Loneliness was synonymous with being white, so white, that no one noticed him when he was against the walls of the foster home. Many of these foster parents didn’t even look at him in the eye. And more and more, he wanted to pick out his flaws and try to improve them so he could be loved. Each and every one of them.

Some of them only made fun of him just to see him angry, because he would get so angry he would stomp his feet and whine and throw a tantrum, and many of them were greatly entertained by his suffering. They even locked him in a room, and no matter how much he banged on the door and told them that he was going to blow up this whole damn foster home, they continued to laugh at him. He grew so angry he tore the door open with his bare hands, and they still continued to laugh, until he punched one of the children in the nose. Even with all that blood running down him he still continued to laugh, and he called him a pansy and it was only going to make him tell the foster parent on him and he would never get adopted because of it. And he made that anger turn into sadness, and they continued to laugh even if he was now sobbing like an infant. Their laughter was permanent to his brain, and he thinks of that moment nearly everyday, and cries.

His foster parent later punished him for breaking the door, and no one believed him that the other children locked him inside and he punched the child’s nose because he was bullying him and calling him names. So many of the children were against him, as if all the white sheep hated that his wool was black. And he cried that day too. And the more as the teasing and ostracizing continued, he began to believe that even his insides were black, and they hated him for that too.

Then he was dubbed the nickname “Crybaby”, and he cried whenever they called him that too. “You’re such a crybaby Bean,” they would say. “Too bad your mom and dad gave you up. What, did they get sick of you crying so much that they made someone else take care of your shit? I feel for them.”  
He never considered himself as a strong duck. He tried to punch that child too, but his fists did nothing, and he laughed again and pushed him aside. “You’re hopeless, Crybaby. You really are hopeless.”

And he began to believe that. More and more.

He often tried to show the older children that he was tough and he was worthy of respect, and he tried so much to fit in. He stole a candy bar and was about to show the children his prize, until the shop owner noticed him outside and dragged him back in to give him a good lecture why stealing wasn’t the right thing to do.

“So ya tried to impress these punks by stealing somethin’ from the store?” The owner had a Cockney accent that Bean could barely discern, but his message was clear. He nodded his head.

“Look kid, youse look like if you weren’t tryin’ so hard to impress these punks, you can stay out of trouble and make somethin’ of your life. Really. Ya look like a nice kid. Just caught up wit’ the wrong crowd. I knows a kid who was a foster too, and he waited a long time before he got adopted, and he shaped up and now goes to college to become a lawyer. Impressing a bunch of punks isn’t worth it. Your education and life is. If I didn’t drop out of high school I wouldn’t even be here, and do you think I’m happy with this job? Not really. So hows about ya try to be yourself and try hard at the academics or somethin’? That’s worth more than stealing and becoming the common crook and going to jail and probably getting bummed in the ass by some guy who calls himself Betty.”

The last sentence he wasn’t sure of what he meant, but maybe he had a point. Maybe nice guys eventually finished first. Maybe if he tried to be good, someone would finally notice him. And he would get adopted. And he would go to a school where he belonged. Maybe things were going to get better. Being a badass certainly wasn’t going to change his life, except make it go into a downward spiral.

He told the older kids that he was done trying to impress them and he was going to try to be a nice kid from now on, but their only reaction was that they called him a “pussy” and said he would never change and would always be a “Crybaby”.

But when he looked back, one of the kids lit up a paper stick, and the end of it glowed such a nice shade of red and orange, and wispy trails of white smoke pilfered out of his mouth.

“What is that you have in your mouth?”  
“A cigarette, Crybaby. What, you want to try to show us how tough you are by smoking one? Come on, try it Crybaby.”  
And the kid, who was in his 20s now, still remembered that smirk on Crybaby’s face as he said, “Sure, I’ll try one.”  
He walked back, holding the cigarette in a V-shape. He put it around his lips, the cancer stick bobbing up and down as he said, “Hey, give me your lighter. The flame is going out, and I want this cigarette to really satisfy me.”  
“Oh, aren’t you tough, Crybaby? Here, make sure you don’t burn yourself with it, pussy.” He laughed, that awful, screechy laugh that Bean had grown to hate ever since he was a child.

And the punk kid instantly regretted giving him the lighter. He still thinks about this moment every day, and cries.

Bean flicked the lighter on, and as quickly as he could, spread the flame on his hoodie.

And before he could react, the ball of flames became bigger, until suddenly they were engulfing him into nothing but searing hot pain, and he ran and he screamed and he cried, but the flames kept getting bigger, until his face and arms were becoming as black as soot. “Jesus Christ man, he’s a wacko! Your fucking clothes are on fire!” one of the children screamed.

The punk kid’s confidence was gone and he forgot that he was supposed to be this cool tough kid, as he nearly begged to God that the fire would stop devouring him, stop swallowing him up in this gown of flames that Bean created, and he knew when he saw that beautiful flaming dress, it was instant love, at first sight. And he smiled and he felt far away as the flames comforted him and told him that everything was alright. For once, it felt good to be invisible. Together with sweet revenge and a warm place.

The shop owner heard the screaming coming from outside, and once seeing a teenage boy becoming a burning boy, he called 911. He knew the kid he lectured done it. The other boys were freaking out and trying to put out the flames. The green duck? He just watched, and seemed to revel in his pain. He explained to the operator that this kid who was in his shop moments ago put another on fire and he described him.

The flames were put out eventually as he stopped and rolled around, but his arm and face could not be saved. Most of it was singed, completely black and dead.

The paramedics and police arrived near the shop, the boy taken to the hospital and police taking away Bean. They put his hands in cuffs, and while he was taken away to a juvenile center, he couldn’t help but think this was the most exciting and accepting moment in his life, and he smiled.

He doesn’t even think about the boy who now had a mutated hand and face everyday, and he never cried. The boy straightened up since that day, but was now on disability and could only hold one job he knew that he wouldn’t be ridiculed in. He thought about that moment and cried. But Bean only thought that nice guys really did finish last, and there was nothing worth crying about in those years. His nickname “Crybaby” was completely forgotten, and he thought he would be happy.

He spent only two years in juvenile hall before he went back to foster care. Of course he still didn’t belong he thought. Even the adults thought that those foster kids were never any good. They always caused trouble. Especially this one. And even when his sentence was served he still didn’t regret. In fact, he fell more in love with fire, and began experimenting with cleaning agents.

Back at foster care, he made all kinds of concoctions, and they were the most gorgeous flames he ever laid his eyes on. He even invited a friend, who didn’t know any better, to play a game of “Flaming Ping Pong” with him. He doused the ball in a cleaning solvent, lit it, and they played with a fiery ball that dazzled his eyes as they both hit it back and forth. And he knew he had a new hobby by then. Dancing with the flames. Playing with fire. Of course, just when he was beginning to have fun, his foster parent came in, stopped the fire, and screamed at him. But he just nodded as if he understood. While he was here alone on this Earth, he might as well crash and burn away.

“He’s a problem child, Mr. and Mrs. Garrett. You have to make sure he doesn’t have any flammable materials around him. Otherwise your whole entire house is just going to burn down. If you weren’t going to adopt him, I was seriously going to admit him in a mental hospital. He has problems Mr. and Mrs. Garrett. He’s a problem child.”  
“Problem child or no, he deserves a home like the rest of us. I’m not going to shove him away because he likes fire, miss. I’m very sure I want to adopt him into our family, and I’ll make sure he becomes a good child. Why, in a few years you probably won’t recognize him!”

Mrs. Garrett was a pretty lady. Brown curly hair and wearing lots of makeup. The Garretts were a middle-class family, and after their only son committed suicide, they decided they would erase those bad memories with changing an adopted child’s life. However, the Garretts had a history of some mental illness since Bradley shot himself. But she thought it was only just the aftershock. Mr. Garrett had jet black hair and blue eyes, and he thought he was the sole reason their son died. Bradley was gay, and he said he would never support his lifestyle in their home. But Mr. Garrett said he changed, and agreed with his wife that he wanted to change a child’s life. And Bean looked like the most troubled child they ever saw. They were going to work their magic and make him into a successful man, and no one would look down upon them as parents again. Bean was the sickest puppy in the litter, and even if both his mind and his asshole didn’t work right, he was adopted. And he remembered when his foster parent said he was now going to be with a family, he remembered that was one of the happiest days of his life. He thought he would finally belong and be loved. He was finally going to cross that finish line. And he still remembers this day, and cries. Because that actually wasn’t true.

He didn’t feel like they acted like real parents. They were loving, but yet he didn’t feel “accepted”. He heard about the story of their son, and how Mr. Garrett threw him out and he committed suicide. But this love felt fake. Plastic as plastic could get, like Halloween masks. They often retold the tale of how much they ill-treated their son and wished they wouldn’t do the same to him, so much that he actually began to get sick of it. They told him many times that they were going to shape him up and make him “right”. But that was the thing to him. They barely tried to “make him right”. He still whined and pouted, but only to test them, to see if they would actually slap him. Show him that they were willing to sacrifice their perfect image and beat his ass like he rightly deserved. But they only treated him like he wanted some candy from a store and they were telling him “I’m sorry dear, but right now I can’t buy you any candy. Having too much is bad for you sweetie”. He whined in such a high-pitched screeching voice that even his father got annoyed, but continued to spoil him and let him get away with everything.

He attended school, and yet again he didn’t belong. He told himself that possibly the cruelest place you could ever be in the world was any high school in the United States. 

When he was first adopted he tried to “straighten up” as every single adult he ever saw said to him, but at his sophomore year he barely cared. He often slept in most of his classes, passing narrowly to his junior year. All his grades, except for art and shop, were Ds. Art and shop he only passed with a C.

He was amazed at how numb he felt. Barely anything brought him excitement, and while his adopted parents took him to a psychiatrist (only diagnosing him with ADHD and his past diagnosis of pyromania), the doctors could barely find out what the fuck was wrong with him.

He felt so bored from his life. He felt bored from his classmates making fun of him and his parents and his daily drama that for a while he forgot to feel, and he wondered if it was simply because he felt all this shit before, that his life was nothing but a circle that went around and around and he realized he wasn’t getting anywhere and he was just fucking fed up with it. Fuck the people who didn’t understand him. Fuck his parents who were too fucking nice and tried so hard to make the perfect family that everyone will get fucking diabetes just looking at them. Fuck the school who wouldn’t recognize his genius. As time grew by, he truly thought he was the most charismatic and intelligent person he ever knew, and he didn’t care that he was becoming a pompous asshole: he was a misunderstood prodigy that they refused to see because they were so used to seeing white sheep. Black sheep weren’t like us. Even their insides are black. They are disgusting creatures who aren’t as great as white sheep.

He prided himself on his last art project that his teacher refused to admit that he was a creative Einstein: he took a canvas and painted it with nothing but random strokes of color, and even the colors weren’t complementary. And he called the piece “December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface”.  
His art teacher gave him a D-, and said he needed to put more effort into his art. And that the title was inappropriate.  
“And that is why I called it that name. Because we still hunt for fuckfaces like you.”

Even when his parents were nearly made pale when the principal described what he said to his teacher, they still only grounded him, and it was nothing that was going to stop him from burning his life to the ground.

Boredom is synonymous with numbness.

Numbness is synonymous with sadness.

Sadness is synonymous with hate.

Hate is synonymous with destruction.

And destruction is synonymous with fire.

That whole entire forest near his home…it would look a lot better if it was on fire he thought. It would be his final sign that he was going insane, and the world would become so vivid during his madness, and he would create such beautiful artwork, and maybe the whole world would know how much of he suffered, how much he was hated, and how much of a genius he was. He said he would burn down the whole world, and he was going to make it into a better place than this cold depressing dump that the white sheep were used to. The world was going to become much more vivid. Red, orange, yellow, and blue.

He went through the forest, spraying gasoline on all of the trees and on the forest path. As he remembered this day before he was sent to the hospital, he really did remember that he was mad, as so many thoughts, particularly about fire, were going through his head, flickering and licking his brain and causing it to burn. He could imagine his mother and father, who abandoned him, who caused him to live this awful life, to say to him as that forest burned and burned and burned: Burn away my child. Burn away and become the brightest star out there. You can’t become a star without burning a little, and you know we only abandoned you because it truly was for the best.

And one day, he was going to grab a lighter. Someone was going to leave one around here. It was going to happen soon. And when that happens, this whole entire hospital was going to look beautiful. 

He didn’t need his other ingredients.

The world was the igniter fluid.

He was the gasoline.

And soon, he was going to continue on his journey, and he was going to end his life the best way possible, by flaming away into nothing.

If only people were nicer to him. Or this whole entire life would’ve never happened. He wouldn’t be here. And he would’ve never met that flirting temptress, that fire. If only it really was a woman, or else he would be the happiest person on this whole goddamn planet.

 

—

The machine clicked and whirred, the colors resonating throughout the halls with light, but yet everything was still in total darkness, the child’s face still hidden, the rooms in the halls completely quiet, not a single footstep uttered. All was quiet, all was dark, and all was chaos.  
Sonic thought that this was the definition of suffering.

To be completely locked away from the world, to no longer see any of the things that made you happy and free, to be in a hospital that claimed that would make you better by being in total darkness and to be wrapped in complete silence and loneliness. None of your relatives will see you again. None of your friends. The staff even rarely came in here. You were alone, in this cold room, forgotten. Dead. This was the burial ground to all those forgotten souls. This was their coffin. This was the underground. This was the Underworld. They were dead.

Sonic twitched his fingers, familiar with himself now. In those last few minutes, he completely forgot who he is. He thought of himself as a total stranger, to be inside an unfamiliar phantom’s body. He knew who he was now, that he was Sonic the hedgehog, some stupid bipolar kid who got himself into this whole damn mess by stabbing a nurse, by deciding being admitted in a mental hospital was a good idea. But it was the needle that started it all. The flare up of his mind. His mind that he barely knew of. That was something he thought that still made him a complete stranger to himself.

These other two creatures that gazed at him with melancholy eyes were strangers too, and he thought it would be time for them to introduce themselves. Maybe they would join in the Rebel Army. They suffered long enough from the King of Spades’ reign.

“So who are you guys? I don’t think you gave me your names. I know that’s a change from this downer conversation, but I have a proposal to ask of you two.”  
“A proposal?” the cat asked. “Well, my name is Big. You spell that with a b, an i, then a g. Cat is not hard to spell too. I never was a really good speller though. I always failed those spelling tests. And then people would make fun of me. But at least I know how to spell my name!” he said with pride. Big was so bad with spelling, that he could only spell three-lettered words. Anything beyond that was simply unfathomable, and they would be a jumble of letters that didn’t even belong to that word.  
“My name is Miles Prower,” said the fox. “And my name means nothing to me anymore. I am dead, and not even a creature in this world. I am forgotten, a cigarette butt on the side of the street. That’s really all I am anymore. I murdered people. I murdered people today. I powered this machine and made it devour anyone’s soul that lived in this hospital, and those people become forgotten too. I am a cigarette butt. I give cancer, tar, and then I am thrown away. I used to not be like this. I used to be happy. But then Dr. Splinter took that away from me. He took away everything that made me alive. He took away everything that made me Miles Prower. I am not me anymore, you guys. I am simply them.”  
And the only thing Big could do was shrug. “He used to not always talk this way. I guess the machine got to him. It got to me too.”  
“I’m really sorry about what happened to you Miles, but I got a few questions. What do you guys know about this machine? Does it do anything than…kill the other patients and give you food? How does it kill them? And Miles, you’re aware that there’s another world in this hospital, correct?” Sonic asked, putting his hand to his chin. He thought he couldn’t be completely sympathetic just yet. He needed to know of the existence of this world, where The End lied. And he needed to know more about this sick fuck’s place that locked these sane people away.

“You probably won’t believe me, but this machine is powered by…our madness. Our emotions. Right now, it’s lapping up all my sadness and using it to fuel that world. Dr. Splinter created that world, because I know that Dr. Splinter himself can’t face reality. So he created a new one, fueled by our very distortion of reality. The thing is, Dr. Splinter himself is mad. I actually knew that since I went to this hospital. He was always pretty weird with me. Back when I was in the Acute Ward, I actually heard rumors that he killed his wife a long time ago, and to be honest, I don’t know enough if it’s true or not, but I wouldn’t be surprised. But…this machine is made with the finest gears and bolts, the finest systems, the finest cleaner that wipes away all the blood. And that’s me. I clean the system every day, from 3 PM, then 5 PM, then 7 PM. Every 2 hours I wake up to check it and clean it, and the machine is feeding off my insanity of waking up every two hours. I can barely sleep any more here. Because the machine even watches me, telling me to clean it, feed it, and in return, it gives me a crappy lunch. I do so much for it, but it doesn’t love me. That’s how this world beyond the hospital probably is. You can do so much, and it will never love you back. In fact, it would probably stab it. Your back I mean.”

The two years in isolation was making the poor child unstable, Sonic realized. All work and no play was making him a dull boy, one willing to slit his neck with a razor blade if he had the chance.

Miles felt something around him, something that he could only wish was slowly choking him, but he felt the hands around his back, not his neck. Oh God how he wished they were. But Sonic was hugging him tightly, and Miles could only feel nothing. He would’ve felt something two years ago, but that was all gone now.

“I’m sorry. I really wished I could make that all go away. I was actually chosen by someone to be the leader of this rebel army. You can join me. This Dr. Splinter only deserves the worst from us. He needs his head cut off from his own spades, and I’ll try my best to make that happen. I’m sorry. I really am.”

Miles’ head was not the same in all those two years. Constant poisoning, wretched chemicals made everything in his organic machinery to malfunction, and even his heart didn’t light up from his apology. However, the engines flared up when he heard of exacting revenge on this doctor. And the chemicals were pumped into his system, and he began to grin wickedly.

“Why yes, the King of Spades needs his own head and ass delivered to him! We will be the new kings of this world! I’ve seen it with my own two eyes and it’s a beautiful, sad, and maddening world, and I would like to be the king of all that, the king of lies and deceit and cover my crown with shit and thorns! The king of creative shit, medical waste, and death! How have I not heard of this idea, to make an army? Maybe because I was so away from the Acute Ward that the only person I could ever talk to was Big and the forgotten children, but they’re never much good for conversation! They would always talk about fishing and how they miss their dad! Jesus golly would I love to see my dad, but he’s dead in the head now Sonic!”

His yells were discordant screeches that shattered the silence in the hallways, and Sonic and Knuckles had to cover their ears from his ranting. They never knew that a child that looked like he was eight years old could be so mad, so angry, so fervent with fire that he spat flames from his engines.

“You need to calm down, Miles! I know that…this isn’t easy to deal with, but you raving everywhere isn’t going to solve this problem! It’s only going to make the King stronger!”  
“Calm down? Not when the forgotten children are crying every day! Not when they cry about their mom and dad! Gee, I wished I had my mom and dad, but they’re dead, just like me! Maybe they should just accept that, everyone in this whole room is dead, just like their mommies and daddies who will never see their dead ass again! They can stop crying, because I can’t hear the sound of my own tears!”

Sonic could imagine, could even see, that Miles was inching nearer to that cliff, nearer to the black chasm, the dandelions and the grass becoming cold and gray, and the wind is actually playing a haunting melody. The only thing that he wanted to do was jump into that comforting madness, and then everything would be better and his world would be completely black and warm. He felt the grass again, the grayness, the puffs of dandelion that were becoming invisible, as Miles was becoming closer to The End, nearly kissing it. Knuckles could see it too as the world slowly unraveled before him, and so could Big, and Knuckles wondered why the world completely changed for a moment, seeing this black chasm, until he realized that he had the solution to stop Miles’ sudden madness. And he took no time to give it to Sonic.

The wind was becoming wicked, and his dreadlocks seemed like that they would be ripped completely from his head.  
“Here Sonic, give him these pills!” he screamed through the wind. “It’s Ativan, hurry up and make him take it before he jumps! It’ll be enough to calm him down!”  
Sonic was usually against medicine, but it was his duty to stop anyone in this army from nearing The End, and if pills were going to calm him down and be in touch with reality again, then he had no other options. So be it, he had to take these pills, even if he was going to become smaller. The little yellow pills were the only things in this world that had color, a tint of happiness in this cold, cold world. Even Sonic’s quills were becoming monochrome as Miles inched closer to that cliff, stretching out his hands, ready to welcome the madness.

Sonic wasn’t sure how he became so quick. His legs suddenly became so much lighter, as if he was becoming one with the wind itself, it screeching in his ear as he sprinted to Miles. Nearly in seconds, he shoved the pills inside him, Miles trying to shout as Sonic muffled his mouth, squeezing it nearly, trying to make him swallow the medicine. He was using so much force on the eight year old that they both fell on the gray grass, Miles’ body twitching and reeling and trying to shove the hedgehog off him, but the weight was too much and his hand was too strong. Miles began to give up in this battle, and he swallowed the pills.

His hands relaxed and his chest relaxed, his eyes were no longer frenzied and his engines slowed down, the flame becoming smaller and his brain no longer burnt, and The End faded away, the grays and whites becoming filled with the blackness of the room and the soft glow of the machine again. They were back in the depressing darkness and quiet of the Chronics room again, and things were somewhat back to normal. Miles was starting to drool a little, but he was no longer mad. He was safe. For now.

Sonic lifted Miles, his head tilting back like a puppet without a master, his eyes distant and dazed. The medicine tranquilized him heavily, but Sonic was glad that for a moment he would no longer think of the patients he murdered as he worked on the machine.

“That Ativan always gets to me,” Knuckles said. “That’s why I never take it. But I know it would be of some use to someone in the future.”   
“Does this room have any wheelchairs to put him in for now? I can’t carry him all over the place you know. It would be better if we can just wheel him around.”

Big, as quickly as his massive body could be, dissipated into the dark, and in a few moments, Sonic could see the light glinting off the wheels as he rolled one near him, and he settled Miles on it, his head leaned back as he stared at the ceiling and continued to drool and mumble unintelligible things. 

They took him into the darkness, and as soon as they stepped away from the machine, Sonic and Knuckles fumbled around as they tried to walk through the halls. After bumping into other hospital machines, walls, and desks that held the Chronic’s charts and medicine, they decided that they were better off holding onto Big’s arms, and while they latched onto him, they began to converse.

“Big, Tails was talking about people in here called ‘the forgotten children’. Who are they, exactly? Are they other Chronics in this hospital?”  
“No,” Big mumbled. “I really don’t know who the forgotten children are really. I think they’re like ghosts. They know about the other world here. They talk about it sometimes and cry a lot. They drive Miles crazy, but I try to calm them down. They just want a family, and they really don’t think we’re good parents. My parents weren’t that good either. My dad would hit me a lot because I’m so dumb.”  
Sonic ignored the comment about his childhood. For now, anyways. “Where are they at? Maybe we could enter the world. As I was saying, we need to make an army to defeat Dr. Splinter. And I thought you guys could join. It’s probably the only way we can get out of here, because we’re only feeding his machine and making his world alive. If we beat him at his own game, then we would be back in our own lives. Me going to high school as a senior and being with my girlfriend, Knuckles with his family, and you…going back to fishing, and maybe Miles can be at a foster home, which would be a better place for him than this dump. And this hedgehog told him I had to be your leader and make sure you don’t jump off that cliff, like what Miles was about to do. That’s my mission, and I have to make sure you guys go through this land safely. It’s the only thing we can do, besides sitting around watching TV, eating, and taking our medicine. What do you say guys, are you…”

It was then that they could hear crying deeper in the halls, a crying loud enough to make the back hairs of Knuckles bristle (as the crying reminded him of his own son). Big now seemed to agree with Sonic, as he rushed deeper into the darkness, Sonic shaking as he gripped to his arm, Knuckles running along with them as Miles continued to mumble and gurgle. “Remgotten…remgotten…” he said. They didn’t know what he meant.

They went inside the room, seeing a white, pallid child wearing clothes similar to a potato sack, holding onto a broken toy soldier. He shook as he cried, but even his face was still pale as the tears streamed down his cheeks. He rocked the soldier, as if it was a child itself, its head as leaned back as Miles’.

The child was similar to a ghost. His legs were intangible, sinking through the darkness, and his eyes were a shade of blue that Sonic thought he never really saw in a person’s eyes before, a spectral violet-blue that seemed to gaze into Sonic’s soul as he realized him, sniffling.

Sonic never had much experience with children. He remembered when he went with his girlfriend to see her aunt in the hospital, she was holding onto her newly-born baby, and she wanted him to experience what it was like holding onto it as maybe “they would have children someday”. Sonic was close to groaning from her statement (as he never said he wanted children, and probably will never want one any time in his near future), until she seemed to quickly put the infant in his hands before he could object. He never was interested in babies and never found them cute, even when he held it close to him. But for some reason as he got nearer to the child, something was telling him that the only way he could calm him, was picking him up, cradling and shushing the little boy. It seemed like almost instinct to him, even if he held a baby only once, and even then he thought he was going to suddenly drop him.

“Hey now, it’s alright…we could try to fix the toy. It just needs a little glue is all. Even then it’s not the end of the world. Everything will be okay…” Big and Knuckles silently watched him, nearly amazed, as he continued to whisper to the child, his crying beginning to stop, rocking him slowly that his eyelids were turning heavy, as if this hedgehog was the daddy he was looking for all along. Even Sonic didn’t know how this was all happening, but everyone in the room was quiet (except Miles was still mumbling and gurgling nonsensically), as the child was calm and quiet, and he fell asleep in his arms.

“I didn’t know you were so good with kids, Sonic. Hell, maybe I should hire you to baby-sit my son once we get out of here,” Knuckles whispered softly.  
“I’m not, Knuckles. I only held a baby once and that was it. I honestly don’t know how I got this kid to be quiet really; I’m really not good with…” Sonic stopped as he felt a tugging on his leg, and he looked down. A little girl with short black hair, with clothes and eyes akin to the boy he was holding, began to speak.  
“Are you my daddy? Are you the daddy we’ve been waiting for for so long? We’ve been waiting for someone like you for a very long time, and now that you’re here, we feel safe now…”

More violet-blue eyes looked up to him, curious, as suddenly many other phantom children stumbled out of the darkness, reaching out to him, some tugging at his legs, all wanting attention. And even if Sonic never had experience with even one child, let alone what seemed to be fifty or more children, he was calm, as he pulled out a seat and continued to clasp the boy.

“No, I’m not your daddy. I actually don’t know how I was able to calm him down. Can you explain to me why you’ve been waiting for me? And what’s your connection to the world outside the hospital? Can you please tell me?”  
The girl looked nervous, but from hearing his voice, she even smiled a little as she spoke.

“You’re the one we chose to go to Wonderland, Sonic. Shadow actually told us about you. We are the patients who went into this hospital who died, when they were children. They thought they were insane as soon as they grew up, until their innocence was lost, and while they were killed by the King of Spades, we still lived on. We’ve been waiting for you Sonic, we’ve been waiting for you to go to Wonderland and stop the King of Spades. You’re supposed to be the knight that will challenge the king. You’re the leader of the Rebel Army that will bring his reign to an end. And we have faith in you Sonic. You actually show a lot of promise, especially when you got the fox child to calm down. He may be drooling now, but you need to watch out when he gets mad again. You need to watch out for everyone when they get mad. Wonderland relies on madness to keep the King of Spades alive, and you must make sure he never gets to feast on that madness. For now Sonic, we are only the forgotten children in this hospital, who cry everyday for their mommies and daddies, but if you defeat the King, we get to rest on, and soon our real mommies and daddies will find our bell jars and we will live in peace. That’s why we’re relying on you, Sir Sonic, to defeat the King, and not only will you escape from Wonderland, but we will be in peace, and so will Shadow. If you accept our mission, we will take you to the gargoyle that guards the entrance to Wonderland, and you will enter this world. But if you don’t, you will be back in the Acute Ward, and you will never know of this world again, and you will probably live on in the hospital. It’s your choice, Sir Sonic, and if you say no, we will understand. A little, anyways.” She looked down as she finished speaking.

As he held the one child in one hand, still sleeping serenely, he stroked the girl’s cheek with the other, and lifted her head by placing it under her chin to look at him. As he answered the little girl, Knuckles and Big could swear that his eyes were flashing vividly, a green spectrum of light.

“No, I do want to help everyone in this hospital. I want to help Shadow, and I want to help all of you too. The King of Spades should never do this to anyone, and I knew when I first went into his hospital that he is a cruel, cruel man, and I knew he had some kind of a secret agenda with all of his drawings and how none of the staff even go to this ward and know what he’s really doing with them. He is a man that’s just as crazy as us, except he’s making us suffer for it, and I’m not going to make him get away with this. We’re going to defeat him here, and once we’re out, we’re going to sue him for everything he has, because no one deserves to be treated like we’re nobodies…and I will make sure there’s justice for your death, and we’ll make sure no one like Dr. Splinter will ever get away with this ever again. All of you deserve better than this. I accept the mission. I’ll make sure I won’t fail any of you and Shadow. You can count on me.”

As Sonic finished, the girl’s face transformed from uncertainty to jubilant joy, and she, along with the many other children, reached out to shower him with hugs and kisses, with many of them cheering and shouting.  
“We love you, daddy!”  
“Thank you daddy!”  
“Yeah, show the King of Spades what he’s dealing with!”  
And so on.

Sonic nestled the child on the hospital bed, still sleeping soundly, as the children took Sonic’s hand (while still calling him their father, despite him correcting them) and yanked him away, leading Knuckles, Big, and Miles deeper into the lurid hallways, into corridors so lurid that even Big couldn’t see anything but what seemed to be the dark side of the moon, and as they ventured onward they even believed that they could hear the squeaking and fluttering of bats. They were entering no longer other hospital rooms, but into a cavern. Even the floors became harder and were no longer smooth and had nice little floral patterns but stony and cragged floors that were rich with mulch, and he could hear dripping waters echoing as they walked deeper and deeper, into the gates of Hell that the doctors tried so hard for them to not see.

They finally found something that wasn’t covered completely in ink as the children stopped walking. They could see an old wooden blue door that was checkered with squares, the paint seeming to fade and chip. There was a steel doorknob almost eaten away completely with rust, as if this door was possibly a hundred years old, and Wonderland existed for many generations, its red eyes gleaming in the children’s. The knob was in the likeness of a gargoyle, with demonic, metallic wings and the screaming mouth the keyhole to the other world beyond the hospital. But even through that keyhole, Sonic couldn’t see anything of this new world.

“Master Door,” she said, her voice seeming to become more mature the more she talked. “Sir Sonic is here to avenge our deaths and to defeat the King of Spades. He is here to right the wrongs and to make all of us happy and free. You must let him through, and let him enter the world of Wonderland, if you please.” 

The eyes sparkled, and suddenly, they turned and blinked and stared at Sonic, the doorknob’s nose twitching and his mouth bobbing up and down as he boomed to the children. Sonic believed he moved just as well as an animatronic creature in a Chuck-E-Cheese.

“Ha! You think this guy can defeat the King of Spades? Shadow was right; I wasn’t going to be impressed by this wimp! Just look at him, all scrawny as hell! If anything, he’d get his ass kicked! By the way, I can smell the reason why he’s in this so-called hospital from miles away. He’s as loony as a bat! There’s no way in hell he’s going to beat this guy!”

Sonic was close to arguing with the gargoyle, saying that he wasn’t crazy and he was going to rip his nose right off the handle, but the little girl stopped him with the lifting of her hand.

“We knew you would say that, Master Door, but we want you to trust us on this. We really do believe he’s going to defeat the King of Spades, and Shadow is quite particular about choosing those who are worthy enough to try to defeat him, and we trust Shadow. He wouldn’t give us someone who’s as weak as you say he is. He may be mentally ill, but he’s the only choice we have, and I’d say he’s quite a good choice. So please, let him and his friends through. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed, and if he fails, maybe I’ll get you a steak and we can have a cookout over their remains and devour their bodies with their sharpened bones. Is that a deal?”

Sonic and the others winced at the girl’s offer. Who knew these children and possibly the other people in Wonderland were such blood-thirsty savages? But he knew Dr. Splinter would probably do the same thing with their bodies anyways.

“Fine by me. But you better get that grill running, because I’m sure these guys would be pretty dead quick. But I’ll give you a tip so-called Sir Sonic…don’t believe nearly anyone in Wonderland. They are all liars, thieves, and as bad as us. They’re all mad there. Nearly all of them. But if you see anyone red and black, believe it or not, they are to be trusted. Even if it’s the King of Spades’ colors. Except for the King of Spades himself, of course. I shall permit the Rebel Army of Sir Sonic to enter Wonderland whenever he pleases, and by just thinking of this world, he can transfer himself and his friends back to the Chronic’s Ward and into here. I hate to say it, but good luck Sir Sonic, and I hope you’re not made into mince meat, by the King of Spades or otherwise.”

The door creaked loudly as it became ajar, resonating throughout the cavern and the halls of the hospital as it slammed into the wall, and a brilliant flash of light was uncovered, nearly devouring everything and everyone around it in whiteness. The children huddled close to him, hugging him, all yelling at their “daddy” “good luck” and “they’ll miss him”. 

“I almost forgot Sir Sonic,” the young girl said. “I almost forgot Sir Sonic. There’s something that you will need to get in Wonderland, and it will be your first mission. And that will be receiving the Sword of Hearts. The Sword of Hearts is hidden in the world of Wonderland deep, and it’s devoured by a ghastly monster, but once you tug at someone’s heartstrings, they’re not much of a monster anymore.” She nearly giggled. “It is actually on something, something that will most likely surprise you, and you’re not going to miss it when you see it. Good luck daddy, and I hope all of us will get out of this awful hospital and into the afterlife and into our lives. You can get out of this world whenever you wish, but remember that you can never do this when you meet…the maddest of people. Goodbye Sir Sonic. Goodbye Knuckles. Goodbye Miles. Goodbye Big. Until we meet again.”

Sonic and the others (except for Miles, still mumbling as Knuckles wheeled him into this world) walked into the other world, and there, they’ve never seen a madder place.


	9. The Phonecall; The Battle with Mr. Todd

The dreaded ring. It echoed throughout the hospital’s hallways, and it beckoned for Sonic to answer, it laughing with its chimes and the patients all staring at him, looking with expectant eyes. It’s your call Sonic. Your mother is waiting for you.

His mother was almost just as overbearing as his father. Always nagging at him to get good grades at school, to be the best hedgehog he could possibly be when there were so many scratches and holes that were on his skin, his mother waiting to pick him apart. He knew she cared for him, but he felt she cared for him too much. And she has been constantly picking at him since she found out he was admitted just to escape from her. You wanted to be admitted in a depressing hospital just to escape from lovely ol’ me? Why would you do that hun? Why? You know I would be talking about this for days. I would be talking about this forever with your father. You’re not sick Sonic. You never were. You’re fully capable of being a good hedgehog, aren’t you?

Yeah, I am, mom. Except you don’t realize I’m as broken as you once thought I was.

He sighed, sat down on the plastic seat, and picked up the phone. And he could hear his mother’s disapproving voice as soon as he answered.

“Oh Sonic dear, I’m glad you answered. I was quite worried about you ever since you were admitted in a state hospital. You know your father Pierson has been so rightfully worried too. He said…a lot of things about you, but the important thing is that he wants you to return to the mills when you’re all right again. Have you ever heard of the diagnosis your doctors gave you since you’ve been there for a while? What did they say about my poor darling? I’m very sure you’re really not sick dear. You’re the most normal boy I ever saw in my life.”

That was his mother again, using her sweet white lies. But he knew it wasn’t going to work this time.

“They said I had a severe case of bipolar disorder. If I really want to get the right treatment from here, they said I might have to stay here for a year. I’m sorry mom, but I don’t think I can…”  
“And why a year?” she nearly cried. “There’s nothing wrong with you dear, nothing like that! We made sure you were better after that! You can’t be having little devils in your brain again! And we can’t be using up your father’s insurance like this! We can’t afford a hospital visit for a year! The last hospital visit was very expensive; do you realize how much it cost? Do you realize how much your father works…”

And there she went again. Her mouth was now like a machine gun, shooting off exclamations in a second. Sonic knew this would happen, but it still pained him to see her like this. She really was convinced he was “fixed”. But no, he was still very much shattered, and he thought he was probably past the point of repair.

“And you’re going to be dropping out from school like this? We can’t afford a failure in our house either Sonic Thaddeus Seabrooks! You better support your father through all this, and you better find out a way you can pay this hospital bill! I’m tired of dealing with you Sonic, we can’t go on like this, day after day of your constant meddling, and here I am, worrying and crying over you, and your father is too, and I can’t deal with it anymore! I just can’t!”

He couldn’t think of anything else to say. Most of the time when his mother acted like this he could only stand back and let her rant. The only thing that would actually work was if he said a meaningless “I’m sorry”.  
And he did.

“You have to be sorry Thaddeus. You have to be. You have to be sorry ever since that damn Christmas morning. You expect me to not cry after everything you do lately, and you expect me to clean up your messes. Your father is not going to be in a mental hospital this Christmas, wondering why his son can’t attend church with him like every year. I’m sorry if it seems like I’m placing the blame on you for everything or saying that you ruined Christmas or something, but you can’t expect someone to come save your life each time Thaddeus. You have to do that. Not us or anyone else, but you.”

He slowly felt anger bubbling up in his body. Of course his mother was placing the blame on him! And she was becoming so hypocritical now, with people like her telling him the only way he could save himself was talking to God, as if He was going to do a goddamned thing.

“No mom, you are blaming me for everything! You’re saying I’m going to make the whole family poor and I’m ruining Christmas! Well, I never believed in a damn god anyways, and you always told me that when I was in a corner I should pray to God, when that was always so damn pointless because God isn’t going to help me! Not one damn bit! I’m a forgotten child, and God isn’t going to remember me or even give a shit! I had enough with you constantly nagging at me mom! I’m tired of this shit! I might as well stay in this damn hospital until your bank account is completely dry! Kaput! And then we’ll see who the better one is!”  
“Thaddeus Seabrooks, you’re being immature! I order you to wise up now, while the pot is still cold!” An old phrase his mother always used that he never found out what it completely meant, and to him, it never made a lick of sense.  
“You were never proud of me mother! Admit that! You were never proud of me, and you probably wished I was different, a perfect Christian like you and dad! I’m sorry I don’t believe in the same fucking thing like you two do! I never wanted to go to those damn sermons anyways; I just did to make my dad shut the hell up about them!”

There was a long pause at the end of the phone. He wasn’t sure why she was being so silent, and he could imagine her right now biting her lip nearly so hard that blood began to spill from it. The phone was probably shaking too; he thought he could hear that right from the other line, the static poking through his ears. He always made his mother nearly get panic attacks. And he realized when he thought this phone call over after this moment he actually began to feel bad for her.

“I’m sorry Thaddeus. We hope one day you can accept our beliefs, and maybe we’ll accept yours. Respect is a two-way street, you always knew that dear. I’m going to hang up the phone now, but I wanted you to know that both I and your father care about you deeply, and we want you to return home as soon as you can, but when you’re good and ready, that is. I love you Thaddeus, and I hope I can make another call to you soon. Your father wants me to cook dinner and I have to go to work bright and early in the morning so I can’t stay here for too long. Goodbye Thaddeus, and I hope one day you can be a good boy. I really hope so, and I will pray for you.”

And she hung up.

And he tore the phone right from the wall, its coiled and colored wires snapping and ripped from its very threads. The staff noticed immediately, and was ready to tranquilize him once again until he stormed out of the day room and into his room, crying into his pillow.

He was shattered. Again. And they thought this wouldn’t happen. But only God could save him. If He wanted to. He doubt He would. God was just a figment, an illusion, to him. And an illusion couldn’t grant him a simple wish to fill up his little holes. It could only stand there, and lie to him.

\---

Sonic was here, finally, in Wonderland. The world he so wanted to see. The world that was kept hidden by the staff, never to be known, as all their little patients were like clockwork in keeping it alive. The medicines powered it, the madness powered it. Extreme irregularities, hallucinations, delusions, complete distortion of reality. Sonic wouldn’t think of himself as mad as these patients. Because the world they made here, was the apex of how much insanity your mind could hold, before you were murdered, before you saw the thing that traumatized you so much, before your mind became completely broken, and no one with the right tools could help you.

And when he entered this world, there were immediately colors. And flowers that greeted him with a smile. They were brightly pink, brightly yellow, with small eyes that scanned him as he walked past them, with a grin that made him think they were possibly covering up a murder. They swayed, and laughed, with sickening giggles that made even Sonic sick.

The grass was bright, and so were the streams he saw in the distance. The wind didn’t exist here. It was probably somewhere else. Not this place that Sonic already decided would definitely be dreamed up by a mental patient. Or multiple mental patients. Who were already dead.

The world was filled with nothing but that. Just tons of smiles, tons of grasses and streams that contrasted so highly, with shards of the spectrum glittering so brightly in the sunlight along with the other colors, and the sky was always the same as he looked above. It was always the same shade of light blue. The sun was there, but it was motionless. It didn’t attempt to move away, only smile and shine the whole world, maybe singing. Maybe laughing. Maybe mocking him.

This world truly was mad, a mercurial place with their very bright shades and very dark shades, an artist who seemed to have a split mind. Everyone had these chemicals in their brain that made their head flighty and to think in all these different spectrums, a bunch of creatures that would kill someone, then regret it so much five minutes later and then end their lives on a whim. There were only these flowers, this sun, these shattered streams, and pure, unregulated madness.

He saw some cranes fly past. They were made of paper and folded, like origami, and they often took over the motionless sky, with shadows that darkened this world. Darkness seemed to make the world shine so much brighter, as the colors suddenly turned pure white, and glimmered like gems. Sonic thought of this world as fractured glass, and the patients broke this mirror a long time ago. And the flowers giggled madly and there was suddenly a girl made of symmetrical blocks far away, skipping and collecting flowers. And whenever she plucked these flowers, a fractured shard of blood will spill and the flower will scream in agony. And this shard of land will suddenly turn red and glimmer again, for a moment.

Sonic, Knuckles, Miles, and Big stood back in awe of the world, seeing this world that was more alive than the hospital. They still couldn’t really believe that this world was made with the hands and minds of insane patients, insane patients that were once alive, and while they were ill, they were able to create this world to allow another madman escape, and they were killed by the machine that Miles powered. They were simply the King of Spade’s slaves, people who actually were nothing to him, and they came to his castle to get cured of the demons that ailed them. They simply made the demons paint this world and made them work like simple machines. The demons seemed to have lost their passion too, and became as dead as their assailant. And even Satan couldn’t find out what the King of Spades done to them. Maybe the King of Spades was as strong as Satan himself. 

Sonic remembered those words, that he shouldn’t trust anyone in this world other than anyone who was red and black. But for a moment, he thought that even a little girl who was made of cubes couldn’t harm him. She looked so happy here, killing all the flowers and making their bodies bleed so she could tie up their corpses and wear them as a crown. Although this was strange in itself, Sonic was brave enough to go and talk to her, to get information. Maybe she wasn’t as crazy as everything else here. He hoped not.

“Hey, excuse me little girl,” he shouted as he ran to her. Sonic noticed that he was running a little faster than usual, but didn’t pay it too much mind. She looked up at him, with green eyes that looked like emeralds with the sun’s light.  
“Do you know anything about this world? What it’s called, should I be aware of anything, anything about how it was made? I know this world is…different than from the one I’m from, but you seem to live here. Can you tell me anything at all about this place?”  
The girl looked up at her, with those green eyes looking like the waters he would see in the Texas streams back when he could taste sunlight, and she smiled at him as she plucked another flower from the ground, and midst its screams, she whispered, “Run. Mr. Todd wouldn’t like to see you here. He will kill you if he ever saw you. Run from Mr. Todd. Run.”  
“Excuse me? Mr. Todd? Who is he? Why would he kill me?”  
The flower died as all of its blood was drained, and it was silent as she said, “Just run from Mr. Todd. He doesn’t like anyone. He doesn’t like anyone who isn’t the king. Run Mr. Blue Hedgehog, run as far away as you can. Because he’ll kill you and probably have sex with your corpse and eat it. I don’t like Mr. Todd. And Mr. Todd would kill me and rape me and eat me too. Run Mr. Blue Hedgehog. Run.”

And she ignored him after that, picking apart flower after flower, while the mushrooms in bright colors smiled with their sharp teeth and beamed with their multiple eyes.  
Miles was starting to gain his senses again. He was no longer drooling and while his speech was a little slurred, he managed to say, “I don’t like it here, Sonic. Let’s head back. I never knew my machine…powered this evil place.”

He could tell Knuckles and Big were afraid too. He could see it in their faces. Big often twiddled his fingers and his tail twitched so quickly, and Knuckles’ face was grim, almost drained of color, as this world sucked all the calm he had. He was motioning that he wanted to return to the Acute Ward too, and act as if this whole entire world never existed.

“Guys, we can’t leave. I’m sorry. I know how this world is, but I fulfilled a promise to the person who appointed me as the leader of you guys. I can’t run away. We have to keep moving. We can keep going farther here and try to avoid this Mr. Todd. And besides, we knew what we were getting into when we thought about coming here. We might as well complete our business here then get out. I’m supposed to find the thing that can help me defeat the King of Spades, wherever it’s at. And I swear once we find it we can get out for a while.”  
“But this world…is sick Sonic,” Miles replied. “As sick as all of us put together. I’d rather live in the darkness of the Chronic Ward than here.”  
“But you want to get out of there, right? You said you hated it there Miles. You said you hated waking up every two hours and powering that machine. You want to get out of this hospital, right? Then we have to kill him. We have to kill Dr. Splinter and then we can get out of here. I want to fill out that promise to that guy and the children. We’re going to kill him, that’s all we can do. Just brave through this for right now. You don’t want all those kids to be forgotten forever, right? They should be remembered as victims of Dr. Splinter’s hospital, and it’s a tragedy, and they should be avenged. You should remember that those patients were there for even longer than Big, and all they did was suffer from their mind and whatever Dr. Splinter made them go through. The very least we could do is try to help them, try to make their bell jars known out there.”

They stared at each other for a moment, remembering the children that looked up so much to Sonic to have their deaths be known, to hear their last songs before they were murdered by the hospital. While the world was as insane as them, they continued on, despite their fear.

The paper cranes squawked and sped past, as the trees with their colorful eyes stared as they traversed onward in the forest. They still weren’t sure of whom this Mr. Todd was, but whatever he was, he was something to be feared, and they were sensitive to every sound they heard, wondering if he was either a lunatic man or a monster. Or maybe both. They weren’t completely sure.

Every crunch and scream of the leaves, the snickering and laughter of the mushrooms and wildflowers, they were careful to hear it all, and they were jolted every time the trees spoke in a foreign language they couldn’t understand (but Tails said it sounded almost like Japanese). They seemed to babble endlessly with their phrases, to no one in particular, while they tried to reach for the sky with their hands, as their branches were really hands and fingers that twiddled as much as Big’s.

Sonic saw more people walking through this world, but every time he tried to speak to them, they would completely ignore him, as if he was invisible. They were just as strange as the cubed girl. They were women wearing barely any clothing, with breasts so large they could barely lift their bodies, and their backs ached every time they walked. They constantly complained about their state of their bodies, how they had to make their breasts bigger to please their men, and they were very much this world’s prostitutes. They only cared for sex and money, and trying to please their men so they can have more sex and more money. Sonic noticed it was possibly the only thing that ever made them happy in this world, and despite its bright colors, he noticed this world was as depressing and desolate as the entire hospital. All it needed was dark green walls, and this world would’ve been completely insufferable to him. 

The women were in so much pain with their breasts, that when Miles decided to abandon his wheelchair as he could walk and was no longer heavily tranquilized, several of them fought over it, slapping and punching and kicking and pulling hairs like seagulls fighting over a scrap of food, that they had bloody mouths and bald patches and bruises when finally one of them won the chair, and started to wheel herself around. But her breasts still covered her entire body and rubbed against her knees as she spun the wheels, and she could hardly breathe. But she continued to use the wheelchair anyways, even if it seemed like she would suffocate from the weight of her own breasts.

Some of the patients were probably sex addicts and fetishists too, to create such women like that in this world. It was depressing to him, really. He would never hold such standards to Josephine, and he would probably end his life if he became as sick as those men, only caring about their own twisted fantasies that only came true in this world.

Sonic heard stomping in the distance, and even the streams undulated over the weight of this thing that was somewhere in this world, coming over. The grasses and flowers and trees suddenly weren’t vibrant anymore, and they all seemed to droop as the stomping continued, as this behemoth was coming and he wanted this whole world to be dead. This thing wanted everything dead. Even Sonic, Miles, Knuckles, and Big.

Mr. Todd was coming.

The stomping was becoming faster, heavier, and he could hear hurried breathing. The women tried to run as fast as they could without their large obstructions getting in the way, and they were screaming.

And Sonic knew at that moment, he had to run.

He disappeared in a flash. Miles, Knuckles, and Big were completely terrified as suddenly their leader was gone, and this three headed, polka-dotted, grinning with a thousand sharp glass needled teeth, with eyes that looked sadistic and happy, was stomping after them, uttering a gargled, metallic roar, before swallowing one of the women whole as she frantically shrieked and one of the heads puked colorful vomit as a response.

And when Miles dared to look back as he tried to dash as fast as he could from this creature that God would’ve destroyed when he thought of it, the vomit actually looked like that Marilyn Monroe painting that Warhol made. In fact, it was an exact replica.

Big always knew he couldn’t run very fast, and he thought if he couldn’t run even an increment faster, he would surely be dead. The monster was beginning to open its fangled mouth, seeing how shattered it was with so many teeth all around it like a hookworm, and it was stretching its neck to consume him completely, to leave no trace of his remains. It didn’t even have to move its feet made of a thousand needles and nails, as its neck continued to stretch further and further, moving as fast as a freight, the beast screaming like a child in terror, as the other head puked another art piece on him.

And even Big didn’t want to bother looking at the Jackson Pollock spew as he cried for help, reaching his hand out to touch Sonic’s as he returned for him with his light speed, and before he could fully analyze what was happening in his low-functioning brain, he was becoming further and further away from the beast, as Sonic pulled him away.

“Sonic…” he gasped, his heart still pounding and his lungs short of breath. “You’re…really fast now. You’re now fast like your name.”  
“Fuck! I can’t carry Miles and Knuckles away either! This fucking thing, whatever the hell it is, it’s going to catch up to them and kill them if I don’t do a damn thing here! I’m going to get you far away and try to kill this Mr. Todd before they become piece of shit artwork!”

Sonic always spat such language when he saw something that even he could describe “as fucked up as this”. It was a rare moment, but it happened. And he couldn’t imagine Miles and Knuckles dead from this creature and having as weird as a fate as becoming something he really loathed: art, that to him, was as creative as eating so many different colored things and then puking on the canvas.

He knew Big was basically as helpless as a child against this thing. He had to get him out of harm’s way before he could try to rescue the others. At least Knuckles and Miles seemed to be quick, but Big was like his namesake, and would’ve been dead in mere moments. 

Sonic wasn’t sure how he got his speed. It seemed as he entered this world, he became as quick as these people’s minds when they thought of extreme delusions. Maybe he was simply a delusion in itself, and that was why these dead patients granted him this power. Because you might as well consider yourself delusional if Sonic was going to kill this Godforsaken beast. Sonic was sure of himself, but facing something that even he was appalled by was making him doubt.

But he had to be a leader, so he couldn’t think of those thoughts. Bury them Sonic, because I can damn well do this. I have to. There’s no other choice. I have to keep on running. And his mind was beginning to run as fast as he was. The courage he had to bring up, the confidence, the constant threat of his friends that he had to protect of dying from this monster stepping into his head…and as Big stood in the distance, he was zooming back; to the battle he knew he would have to face.

Miles and Knuckles’ were nearly out of breath, their feet were throbbing and they felt they couldn’t run anymore, as Mr. Todd wouldn’t give up chase, its giant mouth trying to suck them up like a vacuum. It continued to eat all these giant breasted women, even the trees, and it continued to vomit art that Sonic always thought was ugly and nauseating. Bright yellows and pinks and greens on a canvas that didn’t belong anywhere while this monster was so smug of its own piece that it knew it would gain millions for whatever shit it spewed, and Knuckles thought it could hear it laugh along the screams they heard the flowers make until a blue streak struck it alongside its lips, and it began to gargle and bleed.

The blood dripped from the side of its face, a long red line that caused the creature to scowl and cry, twitching its tail in anger. The tail was a mere blackened shadow that grinned no matter the circumstance, and it lunged towards Sonic, with its white and gray and silver fangs gleaming in the smiling sun.

As Sonic analyzed the creature further, it had ridges on its back in the shapes of hearts, with a translucent body that he could plainly see inside, while the polka dots were still visible to his eyes. Inside this Mr. Todd, he saw the thing that the forgotten children have told him about, or he assumed so, the weapon that he thought could slay the beast and maybe the King of Spades while he went on this journey in Wonderland. It was a crimson and silver sword, fashioned out in the shapes of hearts and clubs. It pumped iron and blood into the monster, acting as if it was its own heart, and he surmised…surmised that he could defeat the beast by having Knuckles and Miles distract it while he pulled this sword out of its body, and if he could manage this without this tail and their heads devouring him, he could make its heart stop beating and he would fulfill his mission and they could return to the ward for some peace and quiet and medication after he had a little vacation in this awful world. All he had to do was distract, spill its blood, stop its heart, and this world would be safe, even if the large breasted women and cubed girls and all this insanity still took place and it still wasn’t like the world they came from. But he knew that Mr. Todd was a disgusting, wretched thing, and it had to die.

He rolled up in a ball, speeding alongside the land and pulling apart flowers and grass and dirt and hearing screams pierce his ears as he struck the monster again while the shadow tail continued to pursue him, and the creature grew angrier still with its new scars and blood spill that it was no longer focused on the echidna and fox, but this hedgehog that dared leave a mark on him. The needles on its feet stopped, the clink clink no longer echoing in their ears, as the two heads arched and their mouths gaped, and the other head continued to vomit more obnoxious art. Three mouths filled with teeth that knew nothing better but to slice him apart were plunging towards him now, and he also knew nothing better but to shuffle his feet faster, and he was so surprised with how he seemed to literally fly across the land, and he wasn’t tired or out of breath at all. In fact, he even grew a bit of an ego, and grinned while the mouths gave chase.

Knuckles and Miles dodged the puke, seeing nothing but plain black lines painted on the ground, and the third head traced them as they tried to take shelter behind a tree, its mouth open wide in anticipation to swallow them both.  
“Miles, I know you’re just a kid and all…but Sonic can’t do this battle by himself. We have to help him too, and we have to defeat this thing together. Do you think you can do something to cause a little damage?”  
Miles thought, but the mouth was getting closer, which was causing him to think in discordant, jagged waves. But all he could really say was, “I used to have a gun.”  
“What?”  
“I used to have a gun before I came here, that I made myself. I used to be able to work on all these machines and devices. I know more than just how to work the machine that powers this world. There are other machines in this ward I managed to build that Dr. Splinter doesn’t know about (because he never checks on the Chronic Ward anyways, we could basically do whatever we want there as long as we’re powering that death machine), but it’s too late now Knuckles! You and Sonic are the only ones who can do this, not me! Without my machines, I’m nothing!”

The mouth was nearer, sucking in all the other trees and mushrooms and vomiting them up too. More art for the masses. More snobbery and more asskissing.

He clenched his fists, to the point that underneath his gloves, they were turning a bright red. He couldn’t imagine sacrificing a child in this battle. If anyone was going to die, he would have it rather be him.

“Then you better try to get out of here Miles. Big is far away from here because Sonic knew he couldn’t fight this thing, and I think he’s trying to distract the beast enough for you to escape. I’ll handle this myself; get the hell out of here before you’re made into this godawful shit!” 

Gurgle. Swallow. Vomit. Asskissing. Miles nodded, as Knuckles stood in front of this face that smirked before him and opened its puke-infested mouth wide, and he spun his tails and he darted into the forest as far as he could. He knew without any of his inventions, there was no use fighting. He couldn’t think of himself as vulnerable as Big, but in this case, he might as well be. He still faced to see the battle as he ran further and further, silently praying that Knuckles and Sonic would be all right. Even if he just met them and only knew them for this short amount of time, even if they seemed to be from a different world, he knew that he would accept them as friends who really did want to reach out to him and help him escape, who wanted to be sympathetic to what happened to him in a past he wished he could only forget, and he didn’t want the only people who cared other than Big to die so quickly. Because that was exactly what happened to his parents too.

Knuckles stood back before the beast, as it prepared to gulp him whole, and he swung his fist at one of its splintery teeth as much as he did when the staff pissed him off about something he couldn’t remember right now, and the puking creature screamed and gurgled and jerked its head back as now the vomit and blood was mixed in its throat, as its teeth were broken and the colorful mixture was dribbling from its mouth. It squealed and flicked its head left and right rapidly, crying to the sky and the sun that it was hurting now, and it puked again, a piece filled with the mixture of blood. And its snobbery was ruined.

Knuckles knew he couldn’t waste any more time, and he had to have Miles run as far as he could, away from this danger. While its neck was exposed, he threw another punch, the spikes on the end of his fists piercing through its rubbery hide, and the blood began to mix in with its polka dotted design, and it screamed once more.

While the spikes were embedded, he slashed through its throat, as his fur became even redder, spraying across the entire world and making the canvas’ only color red. Mr. Todd’s one head continued to bubble and bleed, and it fell to the ground with a great crash, the many paper cranes flying from the fingered trees with their paper wings.

Mr. Todd’s one head, the one that created those trashy pieces, was dead, and blood began to spread all over this world and it began to mix in with the streams. It no longer made any noise, and it no longer could puke or swallow. It was slain.

His fists and fur were splattered with its life, and he would’ve tried to clean himself when he remembered that Sonic was out there, and he had to try to help him too. He ran across the fields and forests, wishing that he had Sonic’s speed, but he realized at that moment that if he was back in the Acute Ward, he would’ve never been able to kill anyone with his fists almost as instantaneously as with that monster. Somehow, this world granted him that ability to kill with such power, and he wondered if maybe Miles and Big, wherever they were, had powers as well. But he had to think it over later. There were still two more heads to kill.

The beasts continued to try to swallow Sonic, the heads and necks stretching so far, trying to catch up to his speed. He noticed the blood that seemed to run across the world. Somehow, Miles and Knuckles killed one of them, and maybe if he picked up his speed a little more, he could pull out the sword inside its body and have the creature dead. He nearly ran to the edge of this world, so many women and flowers and trees and maybe even paper cranes killed, but the slaughter could end now if he ran back in even less time than it took for him to be here and run across its back. He could waste and run away no longer. The heart had to be torn from its body.

There was a sudden boom as he blasted through the land, Mr. Todd’s heads not even able to catch up. The trees and flowers and grasses swayed as the wind nearly tore them off the land, and in those few seconds, he was on its back now, face to face with the Sword of Hearts, and Mr. Todd clamored and tried to stretch back, as this hedgehog’s head had to be bitten off, and quick.

“Sonic!” Knuckles yelled, as they were finally in the same piece of land. “I killed one of the heads! I’ll help you with its heart! I seem to have gained super strength somehow!”  
“Hurry up, knucklehead!” He tried to pull the ridge, but it wouldn’t budge. Even if he was fast, he was still just as scrawny as he was back in the ward. If only the damn echidna would get here and this thing would be dead already.

The shadow tail was close, flying and spiraling towards him, with its teeth all stretched from its mouth, its tongue salivating. It had to eat this hedgehog. Not only was it hungry, but it was so close to its death, and it was becoming irrational and its mind was fogged up with delusions. 

Knuckles was there now, his hands on Sonic, and while the shadow tail was getting closer, they both pulled, as hard as they could, to get this sword out of its body. Sonic noticed with Knuckles’ strength it was being lifted, and they were getting closer, so closer.

The two other heads was there now, and they roared, their teeth becoming ever so sharper, ever so bigger, and they prepared to eat both the animals, before they were going to die.

“Almost there, Sonic! I can hear it coming out! Pull!”  
And they pulled harder, as the shadow tail bit into Sonic’s shoulder, blood dripping and spilling onto his body and Mr. Todd’s, and he could see the Sword of Hearts in all its ruby glory, as while it dripped with blood too, it was now out of Mr. Todd’s body, and it shined in the sunlight, and so did Sonic’s shoulder, as it glistened and reveled in pain.

And the shadow tail stopped, and so did the heads. Its heart was gone. It no longer beat, and no longer did their own blood flow either. And they fell onto the earth, and its body did as well, and that was the end of Mr. Todd. Mr. Todd was dead, and the land’s terror was dead. And the flowers and the sun and the trees celebrated and hooted and hollered, that the most disgusting creature that ever walked the earth, Mr. Todd, he was done for, Sonic the brave warrior from Wonderland State Hospital, has defeated him, and if only they could move then they would pick up Sonic and bounce him on their hands, that he was a jolly good fellow, that he saved many of the world’s creatures, by killing many of them, and the war was over, and the war was won.

There was blood everywhere on this battlefield. On Sonic’s shoulder as he winced as he held the sword, all over the grasses that no longer smiled but also winced at the sight and feel of this, and more blood was spilled as Mr. Todd made its one last art piece, as all the liquid began to come together, forming into one giant lump, then it spread and was colored like paint.

It was the last scene that Knuckles saw a few seconds ago, Sonic pulling out the Sword of Hearts, as he waved it in triumph, as this dragon was slain, and while Sonic had wounds, he won against his first battle in Wonderland, and he knew that there would be many more to come, monsters just as strange and evil as this one, and with wounds as debilitating as this one. Sonic held his shoulder, his fingers needling all the blood, and he flinched as Knuckles patted his back, proud.

“That was cool Sonic. We killed this thing. We somehow gained all these powers and we killed this weird Mr. Todd, and you know what? I actually thought it was kind of fun.”  
“I would think this was fun too if my shoulder didn’t hurt so much, knucklehead.”

He looked up at the sky, seeing it was now turning into a sunset, and the sky was as red as his shoulder.

And there, he saw Shadow standing in the distance, his eyes also as red, and he actually looked proud and happy too. Everything was red in this world, and for once, Sonic was happy to see this color, as long as it wasn’t dark green in all of its sickness.

“You did it, phony. You actually killed the first monster in Wonderland. I don’t say this too often, but good job out there. I guess we really don’t need you anymore out here, for now. I will send you back to the ward, but Tails and Big have to be prisoners again. They have to go back to their ward too. So you better try to find them and say goodbye until next time. You’ll be back in this world again soon, but you will have to meet more with the King of Spades’ creations, and they’re not as pretty as this one. Once again, good luck, phony. Good luck with everything. Maybe I’ll actually have to admit that with your speed you’re pretty great, but back at the ward, you’re still fucked up and the King of Spades will try to exploit that even more. Remember; trust anything that is red and black, and that color is your friend. Red is definitely a good color, a good color to go by here. Go back to your other friends and go back to your ward. That’s your damn group meeting for now.”

And he began to walk away into the distance, before suddenly turning completely black, long, and its red eyes sparkled before it flew off, into the sun further into this maddening world. 

Sonic realized he was actually quite glad to be going back into the hospital and into its beds. He was exhausted. And maybe they could give him some food that didn’t taste like regurgitated artwork.

Sonic and Knuckles walked back to Miles and Big, as they heard of the news of the beast’s death, and they celebrated a little bit, before they heard that they had to return to the Chronics Ward. They were angry, but they realized they were quite tired of all the running too, and maybe Tails would actually appreciate sleeping for around two hours again.

“You know, I have to admit it you guys, but I think I’m…going to miss you. You made me realize that out there in the world, there are more people who care about me, who actually want to get me out of here, and I’m glad to have met you Sonic. You managed to break through my insanity, more than that Dr. Splinter could, and I hope we can meet again. I know I at least have Big, but he’s pretty boring and annoying sometimes.”

“We’ll be back, Miles. And we’ll be back for you too, Big,” Sonic said, as he gave them both a good, squeezing hug. “We can come back here every time we think about Wonderland. And I can have you guys again. And maybe I can have more people come with me. The rest of the people in this ward are supposed to be in my army, but I have to gain their trust first. And hey, maybe that Shadow guy can help us too. I can’t do everything myself you know. But Knuckles here was a big help, and maybe next time you guys can help out. I don’t think any of you guys are useless like you claim to be. Maybe in Wonderland, unlike the ward, we all have great strengths that can bring down the King of Spades, and maybe soon we can get out of that crummy hospital and back home. It will take a while, but I promise all of you we will be back. All of you will be remembered. All of you will be respected again. Just the King of Spades has to lose his crown first.”

Knuckles was about to punch him lightly, until he remembered that he was injured, but he still thought of breaking the tension. “Hey Sonic, how about even if you won the bet you’ll give me your sweatshirt. Maybe for once I’m glad to be back in that damn hospital, but Jesus it’s cold. Even when I try to sleep I still want more blankets because of how freezing it is.”

“Yeah.” He smiled. “Sure, knucklehead.”

They walked, supporting each other as the sun continued to be casted on them overhead, and the red was turned back to the dark green and white, as Sonic and Knuckles were somehow back in their beds.

And they rubbed their eyes as the morning light shined on them, as they thought on if their peculiar dream actually happened.


	10. Big's Story; Convincing Amy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song Blackbird and its lyrics belong to The Beatles.

Big was his name. He always said that you spelled that with a b, then an i, then a g. And he claimed cat was easy to spell too. He always said that to everyone who met him. But he barely admitted that sometimes he could even spell that word wrong. Sometimes cat was too difficult to spell. Sometimes he would write Big the Kat. And he just wondered how stupid he was, but even he couldn’t fathom that.  
Because Big was born retarded, and barely any of his parents knew that. They somehow just thought he was really stupid. Maybe his parents were stupid themselves. It was a possibility.

He was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1973. He couldn’t even get his age right; even if he knew the date he was born. Any number higher than ten he honestly didn’t know. After he was eleven years old his age was simply forgotten. He just said he was either a kid or a teenager or an adult. The number wasn’t mentioned, as if he wasn’t even given a number. Or that numbers higher than ten simply didn’t exist.

His father was named Zebediah. He couldn’t spell his father’s name either. He always spelled it as “Zibadieah”. And his father would growl at him and say he was a fucking idiot and that he better learn his name or else he was going to cut his feet into four.

And he didn’t want to spell his name right. Because his father, as he would say, “is very mean. He would kick me and call me names.”

And he did. He always hated his son. And Big could barely find out the reason why that was. But he didn’t really think of it too much really. Right when his father died, it was almost completely forgotten. As if he never had a father and fathers never existed.

He remembered in the first years of his life, when he was 5 or 6 or so on, his father wasn’t too bad. Not at all. He often went fishing with him on the weekends, and even if the Texas sun roasted their backs, he enjoyed it thoroughly and began to love the ponds. The fish that skit across the green glass-like water, the frogs that would croak out a melody for all to hear at night, the cattails that would sway in the wind and were often seated by dragonflies…ponds were his favorite places in the entire world, and he missed those days when his father was nice to him and let him fishing again. He never went fishing again after those years, as his father suddenly transformed overnight, but he still talks of fishing often, and he wished his mother would take him one of those days, but it never happened. But as he sat in the hospital, he often thought of those days, back when his parents really were a family, and he wished he could be at least with his mama again. But they were both gone now, for good. But his father was gone quicker than his mother.

A few years later, Zebediah often said his son was a class A idiot, he was a dumbass, he wished he had a better son, why did the lord curse him, and so on. While working in the fields he often got so infuriated with him that he would throw shovels and rocks or say he was going to “beat his ass”. Big would cry and plead with him not to hurt him, but his father would ignore them and continue to verbally abuse him.

Even if his memory wasn’t very good either, he remembered working in those fields in their small farm. It was a hot, arid summer, and there was barely any life in the fields. Only a few weeds protruding from the ground, and Big thought that summer looked very ugly, especially in the Texas heat. There were never any beautiful flowers near them at that time. Everything just simply suffocated in the heat, as the yellow and brown grasses were the only thing that survived in the fields. They often grew corn, but even it couldn’t survive out in this heated wasteland. Big thought if it got any hotter it would probably pop into popcorn.

Big often sweat heavily, due to his large stature and how he ate ice cream and brownies everyday, despite Zebediah’s protests that he was never going to grow stronger because of how much fat was in his ass. His father was drinking a canteen frequently, which Big could tell what was inside it. His breath was rancid with whiskey, and Big grown to hate that smell. He thought it was the worst smell he ever had to sniff.

“Come on you piece of shit,” he snarled. He could smell that whiskey on him as he began to get closer and closer to his face, spit nearly flying from his mouth. It made him nearly want to puke. “Why can’t ya work harder? Why can’t ya work faster than a goddamn nigger in a cotton field ya asshole? I want you to be a better son, a harder working son ya fat piece of shit!” 

Everyday he heard these things from his father, and he often tried his best to ignore it. But when he got so angry he would swing the scythe around or throw hammers at him or nearly anything else he could grab onto, Big would nearly lose his head over his father’s rage, and that was even harder to ignore. His father was drunk nearly all the time when they worked. And because of that, he often made many mistakes that cost the farm. Big knew that one day his farm working days were going to be over with, as it simply wouldn’t have any more money to run anymore. And Big knew that things required money to be in business. He at least acknowledged that. And he also acknowledged that they were often poor. Because his father often spent most of the money on beer.

Budweiser was his drink of choice, and Big would see so many of the cans lying in the rooms. Either on the floor turned on their side, spilling on the carpet or on the table, almost nearly half full, the tables having a faint brown half-circle on the wood. Their living room always smelled of beer. And he learned to hate that smell too. It even made his mother want to puke. Even when Zebediah died, the smell of beer still hadn’t left the room. It still smelled faintly of Budweiser, as if his dad’s spirit was still there, drinking his beer and watching some late night TV after working in the fields. 

And he barely went in there.

Zebediah was a class A alcoholic, and a class A wife beater.

His mother was named Aure. Aure was one letter away from being spelled correctly, he thought. She was a lot like Big, being big as well, but blue. Zebediah was the one who was purple and skinny and had mean, green eyes that always instilled fear in their hearts like a sudden bolt of electricity through their bodies. Aure rarely spoke out to her husband. She was too afraid of what he would do if she said the wrong thing. He was simply a mine field to talk to. Say one wrong thing and he would ignite. And she would be beaten again. And he might hurt Big. His rage reached out to all of them, and he didn’t care that they were his wife and child. He would beat them, simply because they didn’t achieve his high standards. 

So she was often quiet, only speaking in whispers. Big thought that whispers were the only language she knew for a long time. He learned to speak in whispers too. He wished he could be loud with his mother and be outspoken, but they could never wake the beast in the bedroom. If he heard one loud noise, he would roar and bite them until he was satisfied with his destruction and it went back in his doghouse. Zebediah was very much a dog than a cat. He barked and tore and tried to kill anything with no rationality. He was simply a pitbull in an ignorant man’s yard.

It wasn’t common for Aure to get bruises on her body. Purple splotches all over her skin, under her blue fur. Even if she knew Zebediah was nothing but a cheapskate drunk who deserved to rot in a ditch somewhere (and oh how she planned on one day to put him in a ditch and probably piss on the remains. She hated Zebediah more than anything but always had to keep her anger neatly tucked away with Big), she thought she couldn’t divorce him and report him to the police. Because her family was always watching. Always. With their round yellow eyes and their pleading smiles that tried to tell her that everything, even when they were being beaten, was going to be alright. Because family was family. Families tend to repeat.

Divorce was a sin, they said. “You could never divorce a good man like Zebediah, Aure!” Even if your husband drank a six-pack of Budweiser every day and threatened to kill you and drop off Big in the large wide open desert somewhere in the middle of nowhere and let him suffer in the heat and be shriveled like a prune, you can’t divorce him. Because marriage was truly forever, a commitment between you, your husband, and the almighty Lord. You’re stuck, Miss Aure. You’re as stuck as a turtle in its own shell. You can’t take it off, but it will protect you. “I’m sure Zebediah is a good husband Miss Aure.” Not that they knew much of Zebediah anyways. He claimed he was a good Christian, but so did many people out there who tortured their wives and animals and said constantly they would go to hell. Too damn many. She thought the word of the Bible could be so easily misconstrued.

Big was too used to sleeping to the sounds of Zebediah and Aure arguing. It was his own lullaby, as his own mother couldn’t come and sing to him about the mockingbirds. Words like “shit” and “fuck” brought comfort to him during those days. He had to transform them into comfort, take their long piercing meanings and make them into soft kind words that meant he was a good boy and the next day would be so much better. He used to cry everyday of their fighting, and by crying, he barely slept. So “fuck”, “shit”, “cunt”, and so forth were words as soothing as hearing the heater turn on and circulating heat throughout the house in a cold Christmas night. Even if his own mother told him to never use those words in his own life. And after she told him, he never did.

Screams were little haunting melodies too. So many times he had to hear his own mother scream while Zebediah beat her black and even more blue. He heard it nearly every day. So he made it evolve into a nice little song he would hear maybe if he was a child again. After all, he heard screaming in songs sometimes. Maybe they could be used in children’s songs.

Hush little baby, don’t say a word  
Momma’s gonna buy you a tormented scream for the caring Lord  
If Momma doesn’t survive this night  
Momma’s gonna buy you a carving knife  
Then maybe you can kill goddamned Zebediah  
And maybe we will be free Big. We’ll be free.

And poor Big thought a family was supposed to act this way. Even if he didn’t like it. His brain couldn’t understand how a family was supposed to work. It was too short-circuited to understand many things. He asked his mother if she would leave their father. And she said she couldn’t, because they were a family.

Big was what his name implied growing up in school. He was always twice as large as the other children. But he was so slow in learning everything at school that the children would call him names such as “retard” and “faggot”. Big didn’t know what these words meant, but of course he knew they must’ve been bad. So he cried nearly everyday to Aure, and he asked her many times on why he was so different, why he was dumber than his other classmates. There must’ve been some reason. Everyone had a purpose in this world, Aure said. But he felt like he didn’t have one at all.

Although the family was dysfunctional, he loved his mother, and she comforted him many times in her big blue arms, as she said “it’s because you’re special, Big. I always knew you were special when you were born. And don’t forget that. You’re going to be somethin’ someday. And I ain’t lyin’ to ya. You’re going to be somethin’. Somethin’ bigger than your father.”  
“What am I going to be?” he asked.  
“That’s God’s secret, Big. You’ll learn someday. You’ll learn.”

Years later, something happened to his father. He wasn’t sure of what exactly, but he suddenly disappeared, and his car was still in the driveway. His mother came home one day in the middle of the night, crying, but yet she was happy that she was free. “Free as a gotdang bird,” she mumbled to him. He couldn’t piece together what happened though, but he somehow knew that his father was gone, and he was never coming back.

Let’s cut back to what his mother did to Zebediah, because I know you’re probably wondering what she did to him. Aure was thinking so hard on her plan to kill Zebediah. If she couldn’t get out of marriage the ordinary way, she was going to do it the special way. The way she didn’t personally recommended, but knew it would get her out of this terrible family nonetheless.

She remembered it was so hot on that Texas morning. Summer was ugly to her too. A blond-haired withering woman, she thought. 

And, as always, before they went to the fields, Zebediah would be watching early morning TV. Even if most of it was infomercials. And this one particular infomercial was talking about a type of comfortable super bra. She wasn’t sure why he was watching it. Probably some material to masturbate to later. And she gagged at the smell of beer sinking into the carpets again.

“Hey girl, is your bra comfortable?”  
“No, actually…it tightens my body when I’m taking the kids to the park. And it just leaves these unsightly marks on my chest…”

She held the rope firmly in her hands. His bandanna was nearly knotted in her fists. And he sat on that chair, drinking his Budweiser, watching the women carefully. They were bouncing their breasts in the bras. He was probably thinking of how sexy it was. Bastard.  
He turned around, seeing Aure with the rope and bandanna, and he only said this: “What the flying demons in Hell are you doing Aure? What are you…”  
She grabbed him in her great big arms and they began to fight, while she tried to wrap the rope around him. Enough of the bruises, enough of the names you called my son, enough of the screams, enough of calling me a cunt, it’s time you get what you deserved, you asshole! It’s time to do something I should’ve done a long time ago! You’re dead to me!

She realized that she was so much stronger than Zebediah. She just never had the courage to ever do this. She guessed that sometimes only people show their strength when they were cornered. And it showed.

And those were his last audible words, as she tightened his chest, tightened his hands, put the bandanna in his mouth, made him gag, and she heard the ladies talk of the Super Bra, which was only 34.99. The ladies put on these monstrous things and claimed on how comfortable they were when she took him out of the living room, out of the land that smelled like beer and piss, and into her car, smelling vaguely of cigarettes. It’s been a while since she smoked. And she craved one now as she put Papa Zebediah in the trunk, ignoring his muffled screams and cries.

She held one of the half-smoked cigarettes in the car and lit it up with an old, barely used lighter. And she thought she could use some music as she drove Papa Zebediah to his grave. His well-deserved burial ground.

As she tuned into 93.5, her favorite classic rock station, she recognized the song immediately as it came on and began to sing. It was Blackbird by The Beatles.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night  
Take these broken wings and learn to fly  
All your life  
You were only waiting for this moment to arise

She tapped her fingers, the cigarette curled in her lips. There were no police cars in the roads she was taking him. Good, she said, and she smiled. And she sang this song louder, while Zebediah continued to scream and struggle. But the screams were simply nice little background noises. They sounded like sweet little lullabies to her as she drove on.

Her husband beat and screamed at her for far too long. She couldn’t count how many bruises she had underneath her azure fur, and she couldn’t let him hurt poor little Big ever again. She loved him far too much for her to let this husband of hers try to be a “good father” to him. He could drink beer in small little Dixie cups in heaven if he damn well wanted to now, or maybe in Hell, which was where he was definitely going to go. This place she was escorting him to was very much like Hell. And she supposed that Texas was really a lot like Hell. Except instead they tried to preach the Bible here a lot. Which was highly ironic to her.

Black bird singing in the dead of night  
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see  
All your life  
You were only waiting for this moment to be free

An hour probably passed as she reached the middle of the desert, the middle of nowhere in Texas as she had to shut the radio off and get on with this. The sun was glaring in her eyes as she approached the back of the car, unlocked the trunk, and saw old Zebediah crying and trying to apologize for everything he ever did to her. But she wasn’t going to listen to his lies. She knew he would be back into drinking and beating the both of them. And she felt no remorse as she threw him in the desert sand, and said to him, “Goodbye Zebediah Richard Paradise. May you forever be forgotten. Because I sure as hell won’t want to remember your dead ass in this desert. I’m making you suffer for all the sins you committed. And this is as far as I can go in punishing you. I’m going to raise Big like how I want to and you can just be shriveled like a prune, like what you said you would do to Big one day. May God save your soul, Richard, cause I’m sure as hell ain’t gonna give you a second chance if you somehow survive out here.”  
And she left him, as the vultures circled him in the sky, ready to pluck his body raw and red. And as she got into her car again, drove off, and continued to smoke her half smoked cigarettes, she smiled, and laughed. She was free all right. Finally free.

Blackbird fly, Blackbird fly  
Into the light of the dark black night.

Zebediah’s funeral came after that, when the police finally found his body with it ripped open and devoured by vultures and other monsters of the desert. While her family lurched away to discuss how sorry they felt for poor Aure, she laughed and laughed, until her body couldn’t handle all the manic laughter anymore. Only Big heard her as she seemed to scream as she laughed, “My God Big, we so lucky you and I! Guess what, he can rot in Hell for all I care! I hated that son of a bitch!”

And if her family wasn’t around, she would piss on the grave.

But Big still couldn’t fathom that his mother just murdered Zebediah. It never appeared in his thoughts at all. After her sudden lapse in sanity, he asked if there were any brownies in the funeral, and she smiled and led him to them. And the brownies tasted so much sweeter with his father gone. He always said he would become a “fat son of a bitch if he kept eating all the goddamn sweets he liked”. But his mother spoiled him with ice cream and brownies everyday. He was becoming a lot bigger, obese, but he didn’t mind. He said just as long as he was happy, that was all that mattered.

And he lived happily with his mother for a long time. He was about 22 years old when he quit high school and decided to live with her for the rest of his days. She said she knew Big wasn’t awfully bright, but he didn’t have to deal with the children’s teasing and the constant hard work. He could stay with her as much as he liked. And he realized that he truly loved his mother. They went through so much, that even if it was just him and her, they were truly a family, not the lie that they constantly had to tell themselves when they were with Zebediah. Even if he was too old for it, she always let him go to sleep with a nice little bedtime story, listening to lullabies that were actually soothing lullabies, and he finally felt the love he always wanted since he was a young boy living with that bastard drunk of a father. And as he slept soundly and his mother left with a smile on her face, he realized that he was free too. 

Blackbird singing in the dead of night  
Take these broken wings and learn to fly  
All your life  
You were only waiting for this moment to arise,  
You were only waiting for this moment to arise,  
You were only waiting for this moment to arise

But all good things came to an end. Even Big learned that.

As Big would describe it, “a bunch of scary men in big black coats came and took my mama. They came and took her away! They said she killed my daddy when I know that’s not true! That’s not true at all! My daddy just suddenly disappeared! And then this guy wearing a t-shirt and a tie came in, said I was retarded, and I had to be in this hospital called Wonderland! I don’t know what I even did wrong or why I needed to go there! I want my mama! I don’t want to go anywhere!”

The police kicked open the door, shouting that his mother was under arrest for the murder of Zebediah Richard Paradise. Big cried when the police were taking his mother away. They were grabbing her arms and handcuffing her, while she screamed, “Don’t take my son! Don’t take my son away to the loony bin! He’s not retarded! I swear he ain’t!” 

He knew that they didn’t do anything wrong. They were supposed to be free black birds that finally got to fly away from all their troubles, and they were putting them back in their cages again. And he grew angry as this strange doctor said he was retarded and he had to go somewhere as well, in a place somewhat like prison, and he launched himself against him, his yellow eyes flaring like sulfur flames, punching and biting and scratching and making him bleed and his glasses break while the police tried to restrain both him and his mother.

The doctor cursed under his breath and tried to hold all the blood in. He didn’t like to see his own blood on the floor. To see his own life bleed out of him and his vision obscured, he screamed loudly as he pricked him with a needle that Big learned later on was something called “Foracine”.

“How about you shut the hell up you big stupid ape! You’re going to Wonderland State whether you like it or not! It’s court’s orders as your mother can’t take care of you anymore! Just shut the hell up!”

Big’s energy was slowly drained out of him as the needle went inside him. He didn’t know why he was suddenly tired and his arms and legs were growing numb and limp, but he quickly fell on the floor as quickly as he attacked the doctor, and his mother constantly screamed on what they were doing to her child, her baby, her son. “You better take good care of him, ya asshole! Or else I would get a lawyer and sue the hell out of y’all! You can’t mistreat my baby! You can’t mistreat the only family I have! Big, I didn’t murder your father! He just…he just…”

She couldn’t answer Big as they led her to the police car, shut the door, and they took her to jail, and as she watched as they helped the doctor take Big in his truck as well, she never saw Big again. He completely disappeared from her big, strong arms, and she wept about this nearly everyday in her jail. She knew he was never coming out of the hospital, and she would never come out of this jail. Big was gone, and she was gone too, in her own little cage, and she would sing in the dead of night about her son and the day he was taken away from her.

And Big has been in the Chronics Ward for six years, never seeing another face except for Miles and some of the other patients that used to been inside, but soon died suddenly. And Big couldn’t imagine himself dying inside a hospital such as this. He really was in the dead of night in the hospital now, and he cried for his mama too. If only he could fly again. If only.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night  
Take these broken wings and learn to fly  
All your life  
You were only waiting for this moment to arise

That was the first song that played on Nack’s radio as they walked back to breakfast in the dayroom. Sonic never heard it, but it was a catchy song nonetheless. It wasn’t Nack’s usual taste in music, however. He turned it back to hard rock music before he got to listen to the rest of the song. And he didn’t want to argue with him to turn it back. It would be pointless.

The breakfast they had for today was French toast and orange juice and some little cereal on the side. The French toast didn’t taste so bad, but he thought the kind his father made when he was a little younger were much better. He at least put a lot of effort into them. He always sprinkled grated cheese in it and added nutmeg, the works. And he actually started to miss home a little further. Maybe if he was back his father would make him that kind of French toast again before he got to work in the mills and he went back to school. 

But he was getting closer to home the more he went to Wonderland, he assumed. The more he defeated the King of Spades’ creations, the more he could be released because he would be dead. And the hospital’s operations would be done with. Over. And all of them could go back to their lives. Whatever life they had left.

He talked with Knuckles a while before he saw himself facing the young pink-haired hedgehog again. She was writing out yet another letter while she ate, possibly to her parents. And little by little, he was feeling even worse for her. She was in the hospital for two years, her boyfriend broke up with her, she couldn’t finish high school…he felt like his situation was similar to hers. He knew if he was in this dump for that long, Josephine would break up with him as well.

And maybe it was time to finally talk to her. And convince her little by little of what the hospital was hiding. And maybe she can join him too. And he would try to protect her of the insanity that was in her head for two years. And maybe he can finally pry it out.

He excused himself, then went over to the green leather chairs and put his tray near Amy. She looked at him with expectant, but yet apprehensive eyes.  
“Don’t mind if I sit here for a bit and get to know you, huh?” He was feeling a little chatty today. Maybe he was starting to fly in his head again. He always noticed he was chatty when he was manic.

“No, I…guess I don’t mind. I was just writing something for my father to read soon.”  
Sonic cut through his toast with the plastic fork. It was hell getting them cut in half. The toast seemed to be made from cold iron. His father’s at least didn’t take so long, even with just plastic.  
Some silence passed between them, until Amy decided to comment on his downfall with the French toast.  
“I know. I don’t know why they gave us plastic utensils. You can still cut yourselves on them if you really wanted to try.”  
“You can cut yourself on nearly anything here if you really wanted to try. I bet I could cut myself on the metal near these walls. Why do they do that anyways? Do they think we’re going to try to kill ourselves by bumping ourselves on the corners? We might as well not have paper either. Oops, papercut!”

She laughed, but she was growing increasingly worried on how “daring” Sonic seemed to be acting.   
“Don’t say that kind of stuff in here though Sonic,” she whispered. “Or they might have the gall to restrain you again. You’re on nurse watch, after all.”  
“They can watch me, but I don’t think I’m going to think about killing myself in here anymore. It’s pointless, really. Especially if I know how to get out of this hospital.”  
“Hopefully you do know how to get out. Because I’ve been in here for two years and I don’t think there’s any way I’m going to get out, even if I did absolutely nothing worrying for a while. My boyfriend Jamie was so tired of waiting on me that he broke up with me. My friends come in here sometimes acting like they care but when I tell them I can’t go out and I don’t want to go out they stare at me like I’m crazy. After six months you’re allowed to go outside sometimes and play the piano in one of the rooms and maybe go out and see a movie or something as long as you tell the nurse, but I don’t want to go outside. I guess I’m…too used to it here. Maybe in the end I don’t care about being released, but I worry about my father’s insurance eventually running out and my parents not wanting to do anything to help me. But I need to stay here Sonic. I’m sick, crazy. I can’t imagine myself outside right now. I don’t want to see the sun for a long time. It only shines on the well and the sane.”

He couldn’t believe that she said she never wanted to go outside and stay in the hospital, but he still tried to be sympathetic. Maybe she was just scared. That was all.   
“I wouldn’t want to stay here. I would bolt right out the door if they ever allowed me out. And if I wanted to see a movie I would never come back. But…there must be something really bothering you if you’ve been in here for two years. I honestly can’t imagine it, but I guess I can’t really say I know what’s going on with you. What were you originally in here for anyways?”

“A suicide attempt and anorexia nervosa, they said. I’m trying to eat as much as I can, but it’s always not enough to gain weight. Cause I’m afraid of eating too. I keep thinking I’m going to balloon up and be ugly again. And don’t think about trying to escape like that either Sonic. They’ll send the police after you and you’re back in here, and they won’t let you go out again for another six months. So you might as well behave while you’re out. But I can’t imagine wanting to go out again. It’s too…comforting here, in this place. I want and I don’t want to get out of this hospital. But I also can’t imagine being in the Chronics Ward either. I’m just fine here, or they can transfer me to another hospital, but they never do that here. I’ve heard from my friends that a lot of people are stuck in here, until they suddenly die. I don’t even know how this hospital is still in business with so many deaths attached to this place. I guess doctors are delusional when they think that Dr. Splinter is a great doctor. I haven’t even seen him cure even one patient in here. He just goes to his office and doodles on his desk. Some doctor he is.”  
But yet Amy hoped that insulting the doctor would put her in the hospital even longer. And not go outside for another six months. She began to hate her friends that would tell her how great the outside was. It was too frightening. Too unexpected. Too hot. It was cold here. So cold her entire body was numb a lot. And she couldn’t feel the pain.   
“You know what the Chronics Ward is like, Amy? I’ve been in there when the staff tried to get me out.”  
“Is it…awful?”  
“Worse than awful. There’s no word in the dictionary or the thesaurus that can describe how awful it is. It’s completely dark, like a cavern, and the patients have to wake up every two hours to power a machine, that creates this entire new world out there. Dr. Splinter doesn’t do anything because he has a different set of operations elsewhere. There’s a secret here, Amy. And I was hoping you would find it out and kill it with me.”  
“You’re…joking, right?” she asked, afraid. “You’re delusional and crazy right now, aren’t you? No hospital can ever do that. They’d get sued. You know that. We all know that.”

“You can not believe me, but once you get in that ward, you will. I’m not lying, Amy. This hospital really is evil and is trying to suck the life out of us to power this world. Right now it’s feeding on your depression and guilt and your fear and it’s glad you don’t want to go outside because it can keep feeding on you until you’re dead like the rest of the patients that were in here. But we’re already dead Amy. Like what Bark said. We’re dead souls, and you’re just as dead as me until you go with me to Wonderland and we defeat the King of Spades…”  
“Sonic, stop it!” she yelled, loud enough that the entire dayroom can hear. “Someone get him an antipsychotic, he’s crazy right now. He’s rambling about a king of spades and that there’s a machine in the Chronics Room, and…just get away from me!”

Sonic knew she gave him the entire hospital’s attention. But before the staff could take him away, he screamed, “You’re just as crazy as me, Ames!” They were trying to protect her, protect her from his insanity, from the madness spreading like a disease all over the dayroom, but he knew it wasn’t madness. It was the goddamned truth, and now they were going to punish him for knowing all about it.  
“You’re just as crazy as me! Not wanting to go outside ever again? What kind of person would subject themselves to that kind of torture? And I always thought you needed some meat on your bones! Only the insane would think of starving themselves like that! You’re crazy! You’re just as crazy as me!”

They held him as they injected yet another needle full of Thorazine, and he screamed and cried and told them he didn’t want to be injected with that godawful medicine anymore that always made him fall into a deep sleep. He tried to fight back, by punching and kicking and shrieking, loud enough that Amy could hear from her room as she cried too, “You’re a crazy old hound dog, Amy! We’re all crazy dogs here! And we’re treated like one! Learn to learn that too!”

His punches were becoming weaker, and he felt his muscles becoming light, almost as if they were dissolving and he was becoming a lump of goo on the floor. He fell to the hard, black and white tiled floor, sleep overwhelming him, as they took him back to the padded cell, and he remained there for the rest of the morning.

And the words, “you’re just as crazy as me,” was repeated endlessly through Amy’s mind, even when she was in group and was told to focus her mind on other things.

—

He woke up hours later, hearing the first song in the morning become the first song in the afternoon.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night  
Take these broken wings and learn to fly  
All your life  
You were only waiting for this moment to arise

He knew the lyrics to the song. But instead of coming from the radio, he could hear it being whistled, as if someone was in this cell along with him.

At least he wasn’t restrained this time again. He slowly rose, his eyes adjusting to the black and red hedgehog, wearing his signature red hunter’s cap and wearing what seemed to be a baseball mitt.

“What…what are you doing here? I thought you could only communicate with me through Wonderland. What if the other people can see you? Or am I hallucinating?”  
“You’re neither hallucinating nor seeing me. I guess you can call this some kind of spiritual vision. You know, the kind that Buddhist monks get when they become hermits or something.” He began to whistle the song again, while bouncing a baseball in the room and catching it with his mitt. Sonic thought at the very least they could’ve given him a ball to play with before they let him out of here.  
“Have you ever played baseball much, Phony? I assumed you have. Many little kids like you played it. It’s supposed to be the American past time, after all.”  
He assumed that “Phony” was his nickname now, sort of a title of endearment. So he never minded it. “Nah, not really. My dad never was a big fan of sports. He took me to church a lot though, if that counts as an American past time to you.”

“Man, what kind of guy are you anyways? You said you never played sports when you were younger? Most boys do! I know I did, back when I wasn’t in here. Hell, I did a lot back when I wasn’t in here. But I’ve been in here for so long I forgot about most of my life. I think I’m slowly forgetting who my mom and pop was. But…I always remembered my brother, on account that this is his baseball mitt. I’m slowly forgetting small little pieces of my life, except…for him. I still remember a little of him, still.”  
“What was your brother’s name?” Sonic asked, interested.  
“Siegfried. I don’t remember my last name any longer. But my brother died when I was 10 years old, and that was always a tearjerker for me. He was like, 20 when it happened. 20! That’s when your life begins! He was going to college too to be a writer. And he always looked at this baseball mitt, looking at all of these famous poets and what they did to make their poems so successful. He wrote the ones he really liked on this baseball mitt too. He doesn’t play baseball much anymore, but it was still something I kept for a long time, ever since he died. And you know what? I still miss him. I still miss ol’ Siegfried. Even if we fought sometimes. In fact, if he was still alive, I probably wouldn’t be here today. I might even still be alive too. You know?”  
“So…wait. You’re…dead? I thought you were just a guy who lived in Wonderland and wanted me to bring the King of Spades down because you were tired of his rule. Or were you…”

“I don’t want to talk about that right now, Phony. It’s kind of a touchy-ass subject for me. And I don’t think you need to know that right now. Maybe if you went to Wonderland again and you get somewhere, I’ll tell you more about me. Good job on defeating that monster, by the way. Mr. Todd was his name, wasn’t it? Now you got a weapon while you’re there. So you’re really in the game now, and you really need to not screw up now. You got me, the forgotten children, almost everyone in this damn hospital is rooting for ya, and I have to say if you really do prove that I made the right choice in choosing you, you would make me a damn happy hedgehog. So that’s what you do. You just keep fighting. You keep recruiting the other patients. You make them march in your army. And once the King of Spades is dead, you’ll get out of here. And I will too.”  
Sonic decided to get off the subject for a while. “So, what’s the deal with that song I’ve been hearing a whole lot lately?”  
“What song?”  
“Blackbird. I don’t know who sings it though. Do you?”  
“Not really. Sometimes they play that classic rock station and it comes up here a lot. I know the lyrics to it too. Not sure why it pops up a whole lot though. Maybe it’s Wonderland’s theme song or somethin’.”  
“P’shaw! I know the theme song to this place is the damn Twilight Zone theme!”

Shadow laughed. It was the first time he laughed in ages. And it felt really good to actually find something funny while he was stuck in here. And Sonic liked to hear him laugh too. It also felt really good to his ears.

“Anyways Phony,” he said, as he tried to suppress the rest of his chuckling, “Maybe you can try again with that pink-haired girl later. There’s no use in trying to convince her to go to Wonderland if she got a little weirded out by you. Try someone else. I know maybe that green duck could join you. Or that polar bear. You could try your luck with them. But try not to get a needle in the ass again, alright? Really try to convince them, be friends with them for a while. They’re not going to be as easy as that echidna. You got to really want them to hang out with you. And that girl sounds like she might take a while.” He was quiet, as he stared at the ball, then he bounced it off the white pads, Sonic watching the ball as it leaped from the floor to the ceiling with Shadow’s great strength.

“I also got another mission for ya, Phony. There’s a good friend of mine at the edge of the land you just entered, called Murakami. I can’t reveal his name (as he’s a very private person, but goddam Phony, you better survive to meet him, because I would be really upset if you don’t! Boy would I be pissed!), but he’s a good friend of mine, and he knows a little bit about Wonderland and I’m sure one day, he’ll try to help you guys while you’re in this hospital. He’s at a cliff by the edge of the sea, in the Dalikami Ocean, and he’ll take you to your next place, to defeat the King of Spades. And I hope you’ll be able to defeat him Phony, I’m really depending on you, and so are the children. Shove that spade up his ass, will ya? Will ya defeat him? Huh Phony?”

Sonic gazed at his eyes, seeing the many blood streaks inside it, thinking that inside them, he could see the death of his soul, the death and torture he suffered through when he was inside the hospital. Inside those colors, there was a red scream, a red violent clash of both the iris and the cornea, and he thought with all that screaming inside his head that was now forming, the murmurs, the prickled voices that begged him to stop the madness, stop the pain, stop the guilt that they’ve been experiencing for so long WILL YOU PHONY WILL YOU STOP THE KING OF SPADES I SWEAR I WILL BE YOUR FRIEND YOUR VERY FRIEND UNTIL THE END OF FUCKING TIME WHEN IT DRIPS ALL OVER THE WORLD AND THE MINUTE HAND BECOMES MELTED IN THE CLOCK AND YOU SEE THE NUMBERS ARE FORMING TOGETHER IN ONE BIG LUMP AND YOU MUST HELP ME YOU MUST HELP US YOU MUST HELP US BEFORE WE ALL DIE AND WE ALL BURN IN HELL AND WE ALL BECOME SATAN’S SACKMEATS! 

Sonic took a step back, a rest from his hellfire eyes, and he wanted to beg Shadow to stop, to stop the voices in his head, to stop the screaming and the banging and the mashing inside his gray brainmeats, and he held his throbbing head that he swore could be bleeding as Shadow stared at him, his brow furrowing, as he examined him fully, as his colors began to bleed through more in the canvas, and he could tell what kind of creature Sonic was, and that maybe he wasn’t fully ready, that his powers wasn’t fully seaming and simmering, but he smiled, and said, “Sonic, that’s all I needed to know. I know you’ll help. There’s no doubt about it at all. There’s a power that this friend of mine has, and I want you to get it there too. It’s the same power that I hold inside of my eyes, and I can tell that you’re strong enough to go over there and get it too. When we first see death in the eye we always think, ‘Well, this is it, this is the end of my journey, my adventure, I’m going to die, and there’s nothing I can do about it’, but the thing is, you can do something about it. You just have to look at Death in the eye and say you’re not afraid, despite the consequences. That you’re willing to fight for your friends here in Wonderland. You’re brave and I know it. You better show me you’re brave Phony, or else I will feel…bad that I appointed you as the leader of the Rebel Army. But something told me that you were the one. Your colors, they’re…” He stopped.

“And what about them?”  
“They’re…vibrant. Beautiful. Like a flower when it blooms fully before it’s about to decay. You’re a burning star, Phony. A star that will continue to burn and burn and burn. You will burn to the whole entire world and everyone will see the flashing fires of your mind, your madness, your kindness and your bravery and your flaming and fervent and fiery heart that I can see inside of you, that keeps burning and flashing and gleaming in the reds and oranges and yellows and a crystalline blue. You’re the one, Phony. I’m sure of it. You’re going to defeat him, as long as you know what you’re doing.”  
“And what if I can’t…defeat him?”

“Then we’re lost, Sonic. There would be no point in me appointing in another Rebel Army. You’re the only chance I got now. I have tried others but they aren’t as powerful as you. They don’t care for anyone else like you. I can feel your heart beating right now for me, flashing and pumping and glowing in your flames. And that’s the one thing the King of Spades really hates Phony: someone who gives a shit about other people, because the King of Spades wants people to only care about themselves, to live in their own fantasy lands, their own Wonderlands, and that’s why he’s trying to make sure the whole world is inside this world of his, because he can’t stand the very reality of things, and he’s trying to cover it up with a paper, a rattlesnake, a shredded, and a blue sad and suicidal moons. Those moons would be the only thing those people would ever see. And they would live in a world as maddening as Murakami is. He will become God, Phony. I know you don’t like the big man yourself, but would you like the King of Spades to take over His job for ya?”

“Hell no!”  
“That’s right! That’s all we gotta do, to keep fighting, no matter what the King of Spades throws at us. Whether it would be Thorazine, these rooms, those restraints, electroshock therapy, or even lobotomy, we gotta keep fighting. We gotta keep winning. For everyone in here, Phony. For everyone in here, Sonic.”  
He thought for a moment, he could see Shadow’s eyes turn from the wretching red of his eyes to the cerulean blue, the color of ice, the color of calm ocean waters, the color of himself, until he could see the redness again, and he thought that was only a hallucination.

“Anyways, I gotta go, Phony. I’ll see you around whenever I can. But I got things to do in Wonderland. As for what those things are, you will find out soon enough, Phony. They got to be a secret for now, but maybe one day, my friend will tell ya.”

And as he woke up, all was quiet, all was bright. And he felt something inside him that he wasn’t sure what it was exactly, but it felt good for him to feel, and he laid for a while, staring at the blaring lights that he always thought was just as bright as the sun.

The sun only shines for the well and sane.

He would see about that.


	11. Letters Between Sonic and Josephine #2

He yelped as the nurse tried to soothe him of the pain on his shoulder. She was putting an ice pack on him and tried to not make him jump in his seat. She tried. But Sonic only growled at her, as he was still angry over being shot with Thorazine and put into the safety room again. He really didn’t trust these nurses. If he did one slightly suspicious thing he was sure that he would be locked up again. All because he said the Truth. The Truth that the hospital hid inside its serrated jaws.

It was the afternoon now, as the sun glowed in the windows, the chain-links trying to hide it away from the patients. But the sun was too bright, too noticeable, and it still tried to reach the patients, tried to tell them there was a world outside of here, and it was beautiful. And Sonic knew that. But he wasn’t sure if anyone else did.

The nurse tried to get him to take his medicine again.   
Prozac and lithium. She wanted him to take it so much, saying that he was still ill and maybe his thoughts wouldn’t run together if he finally took his godforsaken lithium, but he said no. He shoved the pills away. The sun’s light made their shadows droop inside the cup, making them all the more menacing.

He was writing yet another letter to Josephine. He thought it was about time he did. A few days passed in the hospital, where he got the phone call, he killed a beast, he realized he was stuck here for a year…so much happened in the course of a week. And it was about time to write to Josephine about it. She was probably worried sick about him. He knew she always worried about him so much. It was her nature. And it was his nature to make her worry. 

Once again he had to write with a crayon. He thought he would write with a blue one. Blue like him.

He sipped his carton of milk they gave out during snack time, and he wrote, once again gracing the paper with its waxy childishness. The sun glowed on it as he wrote.

Dear Josephine,

It’s been a while since I’ve been in this hospital. A week. But you won’t see much more of me in the future. Because, you see, I’ll be in here for a year. Or so that’s what they told me. Can’t you believe that Josephine? A damn year? My mother called me earlier and said she wasn’t going to spend fucking Christmas in here, because he so badly wanted me to go to church. Well, I’m sorry I’m insulting his damn religion by doing this. It isn’t my damn fault that I decided to get away from shit and be admitted in a hospital only for “mild to moderate cases” they said. They thought mine was severe. Can’t you believe that either? I’m not staying in this damn roach-infested piece of shit for a year. And I probably won’t be seeing you for six months. Bullshit. All of it is damn bullshit Josephine. Doctors. Hospitals. Jesus Christ. All of it is a damn lie. And I know you’re a student nurse, but you damn well know it’s a lie too. I bet you kill patients in your free time. I bet you unplug their life support just for fun. They don’t need to be conscious anyways. They need to be dead. God wanted them to be dead he said. Bullshit. A lot of it is bullshit. You’re bullshit. My mother is bullshit. My father is bullshit. The staff is bullshit. I don’t care if I’m cussing so much to you. They told me to express my goddamn feelings on this paper and here’s what you’re getting right now Josephine baby: bullshit. That’s right!

I’ll tell you one thing, and I’ll tell you another: this doctor is using us as his meat. You know that already, right? Dr. Splinter is nothing but a damn asshole. I learned this from my friend of mine, but he wants me to keep him anonymous for now. He said he needs to be kept a secret because he’s the colonel for an army of mine. See, we’re in the Army of Hearts, the Rebel Army. Like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club, you know? We’re all lonely here. We haven’t seen many people come in here to see us for a long time, and they probably don’t care much about us. This guy named Nack, I heard no one sees him in this hospital. He’s been in here for eight months and no one decides to see him. He says his mom and dad don’t want to see him ever again. I guess right when you’re in this hospital, no one wants to see you. My parents probably don’t want to see me. You don’t want to see me here, all like this, all restrained and injected with this Thorazine stuff, you don’t want to see me crazy, do you?

I’ve been in the Chronic Ward, Josephine. Let me tell you exactly what it’s like: you don’t see anyone, ever again. You’re in pitch black darkness. For years. One has been in there for six years. Another? Two years. And he powers a machine every two hours, and he has to, or else Dr. Splinter will give him electroshock therapy. Another is a retarded cat named Big, and I don’t mean retarded as if I’m being mean or anything, I mean he really is retarded. No daylight, no windows, nothing. They’re stuck there in the darkness, and it leads to another world.

I may sound crazy right now Josephine, but I went to a land beyond this hospital, and I killed a monster. It was quite the accomplishment if I say so myself. His name was Mr. Todd. He had three heads, was polka-dotted, had a heart inside of him that beat that really was a sword, and it ate large-breasted woman and it puked out pop art. And I really hate anything that has to do with pop art. So I killed it. I made its heart stop beating. Knuckles helped me. I had to protect Miles and Big. Too young, too helpless. They couldn’t help me really. So the beast was killed and I have a sword now and a bloody shoulder. The nurses wonder how I got an injured shoulder, but I won’t tell them. Maybe you can try to see me and see it. It’s proof of what I dealt with. And it was madness Josephine. It was made with the insanity of so many patients, patients that are now dead. They’re called the Forgotten Children, and I really want them to go back to their families. Or at least, their ashes to go back to their families. Because they’re dead. They just never forgot their childhood.

You won’t believe in anything I’m telling you. You’ll just say I’m crazy. Well, I’m telling you this right now so one day, you will believe me. If I suddenly die in here, which seems to be hospital protocol anyways, you’ll know. You’ll know what this hospital really is doing.

There’s the medicine right there. And I’m not taking it. I can’t take it. It will make me soulless and dead. That’s what happened with some of the other patients. There’s another patient named Bark who takes his medicine. He doesn’t do much really. He just sits on the couch; watches FOX News or whatever, and just stare at his hands. While he listens to this ADHD-inflicted duck talk about fire or something. It was pretty easy to find out he was a pyromaniac from the get-go. Sometimes I think that Bark guy really is dead. He barely says much to anyone. He just stares at things. But he told me that we were all dead souls, Josephine. Dead souls who can’t be fixed. We are all mad here, and we are all dead here too.

I realize I’m feeling pretty crazy at the moment. But you need to believe me that this Wonderland is an awful place, where we got killed right when we came in. I’m probably not going to see you this Christmas or anything. And it does piss me off, Josie. It does. And I’m very sorry for that. 4th of July is coming here pretty soon, which I know is a big thing here in Texas, but they won’t even let us outside to see fireworks or anything. “We still need to focus on why we’re here”. They always say that as a mechanical response, you know? The staff are nothing but robots. Everything is clockwork here. Once the clock strikes an hour, we move to another place. They usher us to go into group or eat or to our rooms or sometimes we even get to watch some movie. I don’t really care for them at all. They just want us to stare at something for an hour and a half so we can shut the hell up. 

He stopped writing his letter to see if Bark was still staring at the TV. Yes, he was. Still on FOX News. Still on Glenn Beck. And even if Glenn was speaking about nothing in particular, nothing to really be worried about, he was like the rest of the masses, just staring. With their mouths gaped open, accepting everything he said. And accepting and absorbing his ideas and making his brain rot and decay more and more the more he watched. He didn’t see why anyone could change the channel. But he was afraid of asking. Maybe FOX News was the norm here. This was Texas after all. FOX News seemed to be the norm for everyone’s TV. Glenn seemed to be their little god they worshipped. And he asked if they sacrificed any original thoughts for him to be blessed.

Anyways Josephine, you know the whole drill. This hospital sucks. And it will probably continue to suck for months and months at a time. You know it. We all know it. My mother called me earlier to tell me that she was basically disappointed in me and that I was sane and they wanted me to pray to God, you know, the works. And the works never work for me. Write me back another letter sometime, and maybe after six months you can come see me. Which would be…January. So I guess you can spend New Year’s in here. But I’m here without any family or friends this Christmas. I can’t even get drunk to forget about all of this. Thanksgiving? I might get some turkey, but that’s about it really. The holidays are going to be awful without you. And even if I don’t want to admit it, it would be awful without my mom and dad too. 

Still, write me another letter. Thanksgiving and Christmas you can send me holiday cards. Maybe you might as well do that for 4th of July too. Of course, they think you’re going to put drugs in them. So make sure you don’t do that, although I think if I had some pot or something this would go by much quicker.

Goodbye for a year, Josie. It was nice knowing you, but I think I’m stuck here for a while. Maybe you can send me a present too sometime.

Love, Sonic

P.S. I called my mother again and she said she was going to get you something I paid for my credit card too. It’s probably going to be a stuffed animal I can’t pick out because I’m stuck here you know, but it’s probably going to be a bear or something. I heard you liked bears, right?

 

—

 

2436 Hollowman’s Way. This was Sonic’s letter.  
She expected yet more worry as she opened it, seeing that the letter was in blue crayon this time. She tore open the envelope and read it.

And as soon as she was done, she wanted to cry.   
She didn’t want Sonic gone for such a long time. He told her she had to wait until January to see him, and it was unbearable to her. She wanted everything from him. His presence, his love, his concern, his breath, his lips…she couldn’t stand all those things being taken away from her, as if she was a misbehaved child that couldn’t have her toys again until she didn’t act up for six months. And as she realized with him missing for a week, she was nothing without him. She wanted him. She needed him. 

Her mind began to be dirtied, and she couldn’t see. All she wanted was to feed her lust for him. And she couldn’t satiate with him gone for so long. She began to blame him for everything. It was his fault he got sick. It was his fault he couldn’t think right. She wanted to write him an awful letter, one with the worst words she could come up with, but it wasn’t her nature to be this way! Her ugly side was dripping loose inside of her, and she tried to retain everything, become that good person she always wanted to be, and never let the hellish side come out. She kept it until she needed it, but sometimes it was hungry, and sometimes it wanted Sonic, to feast on his body, to satisfy her. She was waiting for so long for that moment since they were together for a year, but it never happened. She began to think it couldn’t happen. 

But she caged up that hungry side, and wrote him a short letter. She couldn’t think of much to say than goddamn it get your fucking ass out of that goddamn hospital and fuck me right now.

Dear Sonic,

I’m sorry to hear you’re still…”mentally ill”, they say? I heard you were stuck there for a year from your parents as well. Unfortunately, I’m quite busy at the moment, so I can’t really write a very long letter for you like I know I should, but I just wanted to say this to you.

Please get better.

Please, for me?

I want you out of the hospital, with me. And we can run again, through the streets, through the fields. We can eat fine food again; we can experience the joys that this outside world has to offer. And you can’t while you’re stuck in that grimy old hospital. You must realize what you truly want, Sonic. Do you want to be stuck in there and have to deal with the ugliness and the crazy patients and that Dr. Splinter and you talking in twisted tongues, or do you want to feel the wind holding your body, feel my kisses, feel everything you might not feel for a year or six months that will feel oh so good to you. But I can’t decide it for you. You have to decide for yourself. Decide what you really want in life. I know you don’t believe in God, but he doesn’t give those things because you want them. Right when you realize you really need those things, and you work for them, you eventually get them. So try to work for that sanity. Try to work for me. Try to work for the sweet outside and the honey on your lips. If you know what you want, and work for it, you will feel that taste, and it will feel all the more sweeter.

Love,

Josephine

P.S. I NEED YOU.

And she folded the letter in a nice little rectangular shape, put it in the envelope, and went out in the summer heat with the trees breathing as the wind touched it and the brown-kissed grass as she put it in her mailbox, and lifted the flag up.

She needed him.

She hungered for him.

She would kill for him.

She needed to feel his fur and his love.

Or else she wouldn’t mind writing him that she fucking hated him and wished he would die in that hospital like all the others.


	12. Tails' Story; The Shock Shop

Miles was born onto his parents, Rosemary and Rick Prower, on October 6th, 2001.

He enjoyed everything about his family for the six years he was with them. Many lovely Christmases, with presents wrapped with shiny glistening wrapping paper, in elaborate boxes filled with things he always desired that he knew his mother and father were closely listening to him when he wrote them on his wish list. The smell of the fire roasting the logs, the house warm and loving and the air filled with the scent of hot chocolate and the ham being roasted, while Crosby sung how it was going to be a nice, lovely, white Christmas, with the snows decorating the houses like icing on gingerbread, and he imagined the gingerbread men walking out and enjoying the cold and seeing their families and the presents they planned on giving each other, in a land filled with lollipops and gumdrops. It was the best Christmas ever this year. And the year after that. And the year after this one. If only life really was like this little fox. If only.

He remembered another time where he was playing with his father on the grassy knolls, the fine hairs of the earth breezing in the wind, as the skies were a clear cerulean and the sun shined down on the both of them. His father held him tight, as he said that he was going to make him fly like a helicopter, through the clouds, through the skies, and see that world’s own white trees with branches that gathered raindrops that fully grew into lightning bolts when it fell down to the other world below. Miles thought heaven was very much an orchard, with angels placing sky fruits in their baskets and giving those fruits of fortune to those they deemed worthy or felt they deserved them. 

Tails was born with a defect, but they embraced him just the same as any normal child. Love, love, sweet love, it flowed in deep, violet rivets, and it flowed for miles and miles and miles on end. It was a beautiful liquid. And it flowed in their veins, as much as their blood. Which was eventually spilled, in rivets that flowed for miles and miles on end a year later. 

And he remembered his last time with them in his mother’s arms when it was a chilly autumn night, as the warmth of the fireplace was making him a little drowsy, along with his mother’s embrace, when he was crying (he couldn’t remember what it was about now), and she said to him that everything was going to be okay. As right as rain, as red as roses, as true as our love. That will last forever and ever. And I swear that to you honey. We will always love you they said. And he fell asleep in his mother’s arms, blissfully unaware of the nightmare that happened later that night.

And that was farther than the truth. Everything wasn’t okay for two years. Everything has been a toiling, violent hell for him. And he will never forget his father’s face before he died, before he was utterly alone in the world and was later admitted to Wonderland State Hospital, to already be in the Chronics Ward and to never see another face again, no one that would even care about his plight, his suffering, even his very existence. He was alone, so utterly alone, no one that could ever love him or embrace him again, a cancer to society, poisonous venom that would seep through that person’s skin and they would die a horrible death just like his father. His condition was a chronic condition, which meant he was very sick, very ill, and very fucked up, unlike the Acutes, who were not as fucked up as he, not as fucked up as an eight year old who barely knew the world and its awful secrets, but yet he knew. He knew life was suffering. And no one else in the Acute Ward would ever realize his pain. They would never understand what it was like to see his father becoming a dead head Fred.

He knew he was fucked up. He probably will be until his late adulthood when he finally kills someone or burns something or someone down and watch as the fire swallows them whole. It might even be himself. Sacrificing himself to the crazy gods. He knew it was going to happen one day. It was eventual. His future was so bleak and gray that he would’ve ended his life already if he had the chance. But he was in a mental hospital where he couldn’t even see any light, as if even seeing would make him crazy. Of course he couldn’t die if he couldn’t see anything that could possibly trash his life away. And he thought that Dr. Splinter was always watching, and he would immediately treat him with electroshock therapy if he saw anything of the sort while he was in the ward. He already received one. He never wanted one ever again. Dr. Splinter thought that seeing was death to Tails. So he must remain blind. It was for his general safety and wellbeing, if he even cared.

He woke up one morning to see if his mother was cooking breakfast in the middle of December, so close to Christmas, so close to warmth and presents and cocoa and love and ham and turkey and mistletoe. He thought he could smell something burning inside the home, a thick smoky smell that stung in his nose, possibly their fireplace or his father decided to do the cooking again and he messed up like he always did. Oh dad, you can never be as good as a cook as mom…but yet you try so hard he would think. But when he went downstairs, that wasn’t what he saw at all. It was far worse than the taste of his father’s cooking. He couldn’t even fathom it completely on what happened that day.

It was always ingrained in his mind, haunting his dreams, made him the insane child he was now, to become the venom, the cackle in the insane man’s laugh, the tumor in the patient’s brain. He was dead now. He died right when he witnessed the scene. The fire, the bloody corpses, the paralyzing terror that overtook him completely and wrapped him up in thick restraints as he wanted to scream, so loud, so tumultuous that even the thunder in the heavens could not compare.

Blood streamed in the floors, like veins on the green carpet. Veins that he thought would be so filled with love, but was filled with jealousy and hate. The smoke stung his eyes as someone ignited his house to flames, as his mother was lying there, motionless, with brooks and brooks of her life on her neck, with something white he knew he couldn’t dare touch. A human candy cane. Made with the life of his mother and the life of whoever even had the gall to murder his parents. The mistletoe dripped blood on her, her lips dry even with the liquid running through her very pale ghostly face. His mother’s eyes were rolled in the back of her head, globs as white as her face.

His heart began to beat at an incredible rate. But he didn’t want to scream anymore. The killer was still here he thought. He could kill me too and wrap me up like a candy cane. He couldn’t say another word. He tried to keep walking, he tried to keep calm, he tried to not cry, he tried not to puke, he tried not to piss himself in fear. He wished he could put the vivid images in the back of his mind, to never see them as long as he lived, but they were still there, and they still tormented him, even if he rolled his eyes in the back of his head. They would still play like the movies in A Clockwork Orange, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t shut his eyes, and he could scream for it to stop, but it would still play.

He thought he could still hear his father’s heart beating, but he knew it was simply the heart beating in his chest. Maybe he was still alive. Maybe he fought the killer. Maybe he was trying to get help. Maybe the phone lines were cut and he went somewhere else to get the police and firemen. His father was still alive and well. He was still here. He was still loved. He was still complete, whole, intact, tangible.

He opened the closet door, and as soon as he uncovered his father, he couldn’t scream again. He might as well become mute. He would’ve preferred it if he went all his life deaf, mute, and dumb. Because his mind was broken, as broken as his father’s head, as it rolled on the carpet and seemed to laugh at him, and his pupils were dilated, and he wanted to cry, but there was no God and no heaven with sky orchards anymore. God was dead. As dead as his father’s head.

Miles called the police, and they said to him that his parents were killed by a serial killer that hung over their town like smog. Like a stain that wouldn’t go away no matter how many times you tried to wash it off. And the blood was never going to come out of the carpets. Or in the house. It would be there, forever. Because Tails was never coming to this house again. He was going somewhere safe. Safe for his mind, and it would cradle it, and it would sing a song by the warm fire with hot cocoa and Crosby singing White Christmas and cooing from the benevolent caretaker. But he was going to a place where his existence was erased from the gods forever, but he was still there, and no one else could see him.

This serial killer seems to target happy families. I don’t know why exactly, but maybe he’s jealous of the relationship you had with your parents. I’m sorry Miles. I’m very sorry, and this will be a very tough, and I mean, a very tough thing for you to go through. I don’t know what I can do to help you through this. I wished I could make it all go away. I really wished. But this must be traumatizing for you. So I’m going to leave you to be treated in Wonderland State Hospital. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry about all of this. We’ll get this man, and we’ll make him pay and suffer. No kid should ever go through this. No one should.

The man with the glasses, the red sideburns, the white coat, along with several white coated men, took him away to their crazy truck, that might as well had wacky eyes and a tongue sticking out and a horn that was completely loud and obnoxious than horns should be. He was restrained in a white coat, like the white coated men, and it felt so heavy on his body and he felt he couldn’t breathe, as if this very truck was running over his chest repeatedly. He was going to Austin, he was going to get treated, he was going to be alright, he was going to be put in a foster home with a very loving and caring family who would understand his pain and torment. But once again the voice in his head started talking, saying that was farther from the truth. If only life was like that little fox. If only.

The doctor put him through psychological testing. Nothing ever made sense to him in his little head, no matter how many times it ran like an electrical current through his brain. Who cared if the child started the fire? A killer started a fire in his house, and his parents, his two loving parents, was taken away from him, because he was apparently “jealous”. And he learned on how evil jealousy really was. It made you ruin other people’s lives, simply because you wanted what the other person had, something that the other person worked for, nearly died for, was born with. Yes, even the devil was struck with jealousy at God, and he consumed people’s lives because of his rage and he had what he always yearned for before he fell from heaven: respect. 

The man, named Dr. Splinter, considered Miles a very unstable patient, one who would hurt himself if he was near anything that could hurt him. So he dragged him, shoved him inside, and locked him in the Chronics Ward. And there, he was greeted with darkness. That was the first friend there he made. But it wasn’t exactly a friend. Just an annoying acquaintance he had to get along with. Because they were going to be in there for a long time.

He met Big, and a few other patients he couldn’t even communicate with. They dribbled and walked aimlessly and spoke in gurgles as if they only stared at the rain with their mouths hanging open like dodos. They were simply dodos. Stupid birds who Miles knew were slowly, very slowly, about to become extinct.

There was a machine in the room that beckoned him, with its swirling colors and the food of his choice popping out of the sides with trays always with a nice tall glass of milk. As soon as Miles was in its sight, it loved him, it hated him, it feared him, in bitter jealousy, and it wanted him to fix it, make it better, make it have a life that was a vast improvement of Miles’. And Miles became its mother. It warmed it, it gave it attention with soft coos, and he could hold it too if it wasn’t so heavy, so cold, so unfeeling. But he thought he could hear it laughing under its whirrs and clicks and beeps.

He cradled it close, making it better, making it a successor, making it a killer, making it a murderer of people’s families and of the patients in the Chronics Ward who no longer had any use for Dr. Splinter, as it burned them, made them into ashes, their skins turning to rust, to singed volcanic stones. They couldn’t even scream as they turned them in, baking these people, making the machine become satiated for only two hours, wanting more skin and rust and volcanic ashes, and it whirred and clicked and beeped, to show it approved of Papa Miles, and he was a good mother, and it loved him.

Ash to ash.  
Dust to dust.  
Love to love.

Miles quickly learned of the world of Wonderland, but he never actually saw it for himself. He knew that he was simply Dr. Splinter’s pawn in a little game of his own version of chess made simply to amuse himself. He couldn’t accept reality, so he substituted his own, because he was afraid. He wanted to escape. He wanted to be in a land that was so much more alive than Earth, that drained the veins of anyone who entered the hospital hoping to get treated, and this world was so vivid and so bright that this reality was simply so dull to him. But of course it was dull to Miles. Because the only color he ever saw in his life for two years was black.

More patients came in, drooling and incompetent and unresponsive and not vocal except in groans and gurgles, and they shat their pants constantly. They were babies. Even younger than babies. Their brain was stabbed with a stake, and it made them lose their soul and revert back to what Tails used to be seven years ago. He didn’t personally know them, as he couldn’t learn anything except which one made different noises when touched, which one flapped his hands and which one protected himself from the light of the machine, and all that was such boring and insignificant information not useful to Dr. Splinter. They were completely useless to him. So inside the machine they go, to be burned to a crisp, to be put in bell jars, to feed the metal monster. It whirred a pleasant “thank you” as it fed on more souls, but he knew the thank you didn’t mean anything. Another two hours, he had to come back, and feed more to the monster. More people from the Disturbed Ward coming to the Chronics Ward, and they would be sacrificed like the stupid drooling pigs they were. They were slaughtered by the mechanical beast, to keep its heart pumping, the electricity running, the world of Wonderland alive, and Dr. Splinter happy. Or else electroshock therapy. And Miles would become a meal to the beast as well.

Miles learned quickly when he ignored the machine, ignored its pleas and cries of more food, more patients, Dr. Splinter walked inside the ward and said the child needed more treatment, as he was becoming depressed, his post-traumatic memories were coming back to him, and he didn’t want him to think about dying like he always did everyday. So he had to rewire his brain by strapping him to the small table, his hands couldn’t move and Dr. Splinter wrapped him with a belt, and he put the rubber molding in his mouth as he placed all these things that looked like headphones to his ears. He was afraid, as afraid as when he saw the blood and fire in his house, and his heart began to beat so quickly, so rapidly, that it seemed as if it was trying to crawl out of his chest. He wanted to escape, he wanted the belt to come off, but Splinter said to not move, and he told him to bite down hard, because he was going to experience a little bit of pain for a little bit, and he turned the machine on, made it glow and made the bulbs a fluorescent yellow, and then the electricity slithered into his head, and his brain, and his body shook. He wanted to bite down hard on his tongue, have his hands and feet flying in the air on the impact of this shock, and he wanted to scream and cry and tell the doctor to stop, stop shocking him, he was only eight years old, his mother and father were killed by a serial killer did he had any heart or leg or brain of cock or any thing of the like as the runners made their marks from the machine wolves of the estuary. The brain filled with pop rocks and pop pop pop they would go slimy pink goo it became and it would sink from his brain and morph into a thing of its own creation as he smoked smoked smoked the cancer, smoked the cancer, as much as the machine smokes and says hello and waves and smiles. Smiles were evil cruel things that wanted to stab you behind your head and make you into a warranted soldier of the brigade to kill anyone to avenge the world beyond our heads and hearts and dreams. Head is gone. Head is dead. Dead head Fred. Dead head Rick. Rick the liar. Rick the killer. Rick the insane. Rosemary bushes are coming along the bend and wish to kiss him goodnight.

Ring around the rosy  
Pockets full of posy  
Ashes, ashes  
We all fall down

And he found out later he pissed himself. Maybe of fear, maybe of the shock. While he was electrocuted for a short moment, he heard voices, voices unknown to him, but they sounded tiny and soft, that sang Ring Around the Rosy, and it sounded like it came from somewhere in the hospital. Maybe Dr. Splinter tortured more children here, who lost their moms and dads too, who were just as alone and afraid as he was. Maybe Dr. Splinter was even the murderer. He couldn’t doubt it. And his head was so loose now that he couldn’t even come to a rational conclusion of what happened to his parents.

He just wanted them back, back to the carefree love and to be held and to be played with with his father. But he couldn’t accept that those days were over, and they would possibly never come back.

He heard the rumors too. People who were admitted in the hospital usually ended up being dead. They never came out. They were in here for years and years until the doctor thought a lobotomy was necessary. Then after he drove a stake through your brain, a sudden death that was most likely claimed to be heart failure. Very few patients were let out. No one could escape from this Dr. Splinter. He wanted people to suffer, to keep the machine feeding and to keep that other world alive, wherever it was at.

He prayed to God a lot, but he knew God had forgotten about him. Just like how everyone else but Big and the doctor forgot about him too. He was just as gone as his mother and father. He wasn’t dead in the head, but he was close. Oh so very close.

If only life was like that little fox. If only.

But it was.

 

—-

 

Come to the shock shop  
where you can see  
You can get your brain’s electrons realigned for free!  
The shock traveling through my skin and my brain  
Oh, what wondrous things now that the demons have gone away!  
An old man who mumbled and babbled and jibbled and jabbled is about to find  
That the shock shop is one of the greatest shows and one of the greatest things  
Money can buy!  
Find the black dark old stinky gunk from your head, let the doctor find  
What makes you sin  
What makes you tick  
What makes you binge  
What makes you dead  
And from the gray silvery smoke that arises from the door

You will find the fantastic straps  
That thing you sink your teeth into  
The metal gear, the wires and snakes and fangs  
Oh, you will find that  
And so much more!  
Blue hedgehog blue hedgehog  
You seem to see the old man  
Look see look see  
Look see what they’re going to do  
What they will do for his land, for his wife, for his kids  
Grandpa will be okay, he won’t have his legs drenched with piss!

Oh they will for a while  
Oh they always go when they get shocked  
Oh blue hedgehog, watch for a while and learn  
The fruits of research in psychiatry  
Watch as we make his brain just for a short moment  
Sting and burn  
The electricity goes off, the lights go on  
The sounds creep all over the room like silent serpents in the night  
Crickle crackle crickle crackle  
Zap! Bazow! Zing!  
Ba ba ba BADING!  
The eyes of God are watching!  
You think you know everything, you think you’re always right

When I know everything you’ve been doing   
When there’s No MoRe LiGhTs  
OH blue HEDGEhog you can’t WATCH NO more  
When the show just STartED  
You must SIMPLY HEAR ALL THE GODDAMN SCREAMS  
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH  
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD  
SAVE ME FROM THE WRETCHEDNESS OF THE BITCH  
SHE’S EATING MY BALLS SHE’S EATING MY EYES  
WHY DON’T YOU FUCK AROUND IN MY ASS AND PULL OUT A DEAD DESECRATED FLY  
SING, SING, OLD MAN SING  
HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY FROWN AT A TIME LikE wING?  
ZEBRA MOOSE LION JACKAL  
HEDGEHOG HEDGEHOG SAVE SAVE ME BEFORE THE MACHINE GOES CRACKLE CRACKLE  
FUCK THE SHIT, FUCK THE BITCH  
FUCK THE DITCH, FUCK THE SWITCH  
The man found me in the car lot and thought it was a good idea  
To give me something sweet  
But turns out that sweet thing was my dick  
Why don’t you wait until it’s fully grown, a full prick  
And maybe you don’t have to hear it go crick, crick, crick

Ding!  
Shock’s done!  
They say in glee  
He’s out not conscious, put him near ward three  
Disturbed Ward  
Where only the most insane lived  
Look see look see little blue hedgehog  
See him how well are the patients we treat!  
They put him on a cart and wheel him away  
The frozen lights blazing above his head as he played  
Cards with the others  
He twitched his fingers, his mind flickered  
“What happened to the old man that would get him fingered  
By Zeus’ bolts?” he bickered  
And Bark said  
“He thought he saw a silhouetted man talk to him.  
“He said if he didn’t discover something about a patient’s death  
“He will be hexed.  
“But if we don’t get out of this ward Sonic,  
I’m  
Afraid  
We’re  
Next”


	13. The Monochrome Family Story

The whitish glow of the sun ran across the hills from the hospital to reach Sonic’s eyes. The light was the fastest thing in the world, and it boasted it. One day Sonic wanted to be just as fast as the sun. But it only shined for the well and the sane.

If that was true, the entire world would be completely dark, pitch black, with no sharp knives poking holes in the sky. The sun shined for the insane too. Because without any light in their world, there would be nothing left for them to be tortured with. And they would be sane. So really, it was kind of like the sun liked the insane enough to let them live. It liked everybody. The sun wanted to shine the whole world in its glorious, god-like face and have them fear, have them know that without it, no one would be alive today if it wasn’t for the sun’s tendrils reaching out and stroking the entire world, stroking the plants to life and let them breathe the life that Air gave them, give light to the oceans that its brother, Moon, takes over in his spare time, when he’s not chasing women all across the galaxy in the day. And he makes sure that Earth isn’t blind. “Oh my poor little son, Earth,” it says with sympathy in his fair voice. “I will make sure you are kept seeing the whole galaxy beyond you, while all my other brothers and sisters and children take care of you and you can see the stars blaze for you in the night, oh how bright they shine my little son. With my many hands and my many feet your crops will not go unfed, and I will make your sailing go by without a single issue. Unless, Air, your sister, wants to create a storm that will trouble your brethren. Spin my son, spin, dance to this tune of the stars, and maybe you will see, one day, how great my hospitality is. Because I’m sure God Himself wouldn’t make you last longer here. We will go down together my son. You’re my favorite. And you always will be.”

God. How he hated that word.

Sonic stretched languidly as he made a mess of his blankets and covers. Knuckles was gone again, always waking up much earlier than him. He always got up at about 5 AM. While Sonic always seemed to sleep until 8. Down to breakfast, as usual, he remarked in his head. I wonder what kind of shitty food will they serve us this time? Maybe some meatloaf made with the recent patient that died today?

Yet another one bit the dust. His name was Gerald. He was an old, old man, suffering from depression and anxiety issues. He wanted to come to Wonderland to get treatment and to become a better man for his grandchildren. Turns out he became a dead man.

He received shock treatment prior to becoming dead and an unresponsive, drooling rag doll. His one eye appeared to be bruised and punctured, a sign that he had a lobotomy to treat his suicidal behaviors. Days later, he suddenly died, of natural causes, says Dr. Splinter. But Sonic knew it was heart failure. Yet again.

This hospital always seemed to go for the heart. A fragile organ. One puncture in it and you might as well consider yourself as dead as Mr. Gerald. The brain and heart were always organs that Wonderland tried to soothe, tried to make the pain go away, but it just simply heightened the problem even worse, and next thing you knew, you were dead or you were a non-functioning potato who was simply fed through tubes that stretched on to the near-dead man’s gullet. There were a lot of men like that in the hospital. 

The hospital staff always wheeled them in the lunch room, make their food into a paste that was always brown or yellow that they might as well be eating shit or piss, and they put it inside a tube that went down their throat and they would only utter strange, guttural, animal-like noises to express pleasure in the shit-like food they were being fed. And the staff would laugh and talk and say that they once knew this patient as a walking, free man, but now he might as well be a lost soul that was either looking for heaven or hell. And most of them probably went to hell for believing in another god, named Dr. Splinter, that could cure of what ailed them.

Sonic thought if he ever ended up this way in the hospital, they might as well fed him nails and razorblades, cause he was very sure that he wanted to die before he was even seen like that.

From what Sonic knew of Dr. Splinter, it was very little. Apparently he was a prestigious doctor that graduated from Harvard with Honors and a very nice doctorate degree to go with that. He preached about the wrongness of using electroshock therapy and lobotomy, but something somehow changed that made him believe those were the best cures for almost everyone in the hospital. That and probably something that they injected in you that made your heart thump and claw out of your chest until it gave out.

He told the staff all about the strangeness of the sudden heart failures in all these patients, including Mr. Gerald, were having, and all the lobotomies and electroshock that never worked on a single patient or even yielded successful results. But they seemed to be stuck in the past of how much of a great doctor he was. He treated Nash before he won the Nobel Prize. He made many discoveries about autism and bipolar. But Sonic never saw those discoveries or any of his knowledge put to use. Only cruelty and apathy for all the cases he was working with. He was sure Dr. Splinter didn’t care that he had a girlfriend and school to attend to and his father was upset to see him not in his home and church on Christmas day and his mother upset that her son was fucked up. He simply drew in his clipboard of strange creatures that Sonic couldn’t exactly discern what they were supposed to be, and he left in his office, the staff saying he was “taking notes”, but it seemed as if he was only drawing, only creating more of his freakish monsters.

He wondered what happened that made Dr. Splinter into this uncaring man that people simply called him a “doctor” by name. But he thought many doctors these days were only called “doctors” because they went through many years of college, and not because they treated people, made them healthy and sane again, like they were paid to be doing. Sometimes he thought they only wanted his cash, and that was all Dr. Splinter was trying to do: keep these patients in as long as possible until he was tired of them, using up all their money and resources, then he lobotomized them and they would be burned down to ashes in an oxidized bell jar.  
He thought of the children who begged for his help, to at least get one final goodbye as he could pass on their bell jars to their family and friends.

He thought of this and more.

He sliced his breakfast sandwich in half with his fork, thinking, thinking. He wondered because he was refusing their medication, that now they were smashing it up and putting it in his food. His moods felt a little balanced today, and he thought they tasted a bit saltier than usual. Lithium was a drug that was toxic in high quantities, but if used sparingly it stabilized bipolar moods. It was the hemlock from the apothecary that would heal him. It would make him suffer a little, but slowly, it would swim in his streams and he would be what people would like to call “normal”.

His mother denied that he wasn’t insane like everyone who was locked in here.

“He was normal since he was a small little boy!” she said.

Normal.

Mal is a prefix that is often meant “bad”.

Nor was also a prefix that meant “not”.

Not bad.

Was that all they were trying to say when they said they wished he was normal?

That he wouldn’t be a bad boy anymore?

It all was bullshit, but he kept it tucked away inside his polarized mind as he chewed the tough egg and cheese inside his mouth. He wasn’t sure if the eggs were real, but the cheese at least was. Maybe he should give them credit for that. But only a little.

They had oatmeal again, but again, only the purple weasel ate it. Knuckles ate almost everything except the oatmeal. He said all it was made from were some dried up oats and molasses and probably a few grams of some vitamin added in so they wouldn’t go insane for a few minutes. Who was the chef of this place? No one knew, he probably spat in the food for everything they’ve done to Mr. Gerald. Maybe he knew everything about this hospital too, but he was quiet. He would say nothing, except spit would come flying from his mouth. The spit was made with the gathering of hatred and a few curse words, along with some piss and other bodily fluids. It tasted like the oatmeal.

“What are you thinking about?” Knuckles asked, breaking his broken train of thought, breaking it even more to a few small pieces that were now on the hard, concrete floor of his head.  
“Oh. Nothing. Just about the kids we saw when we went to Wonderland. I feel so bad for those little guys. I think we should go back there, even if I know we don’t want to. They all said it was the only way we could get out of here, right?”  
“Yeah, but Sonic, your shoulder hasn’t healed up completely. I say we at least take a few days off before we go back. I know you want to get out of here but…”

He wiped his mouth as he finished off the egg and cheese sandwich. For hospital food it was a little greasy and he thought of himself as a fat, gibbering fool who was so hungry he would put anything in his stomach as he chewed it up. “But what? We’ll be fine, Knux. I don’t think we’re going to be ordered to do anything rough this time around. Apparently talking to the guy who said I needed to go there, all we’re going to do is go to the edge of the world talk to this guy who knows some dirt about the King of Spades. It’s simply a mission to get some information is all.”  
“But when we went there I never found the edge of the world. That place seems to stretch on for miles and miles and miles. And what if we find another monster? You can’t fight with that shoulder bringing you down.”  
“We’ll be fine, Knux. I got the Sword of Hearts now. If it gets too rough that’s where you guys come in. As long as it isn’t as bad as the battle with that three-headed…thing, then I think we’ll be okay. He said it wasn’t going to be, and I trust him. You guys know what the land looks like now, so I’m sure you can be prepared. After group we’re going.”  
“Why do we have to go to that damn group session before we go? I don’t have anything to say and I doubt the people here will make me feel any better about our situation!”  
“Because knucklehead, they want everyone to participate and if they find out that we’re missing we can get in trouble for that. We might as well suffer for an hour before it’s free time and we can go out to Wonderland for a while before they start searching for us again. Just make up something if you can’t find anything you want to talk about, like you were abused by your dad or some shit. I’m sure they’ll eat that up.”  
“Alright, fine.” Knuckles folded his hands and lay back in his chair, looking down on his tray. He wondered if the oatmeal was made with saliva and glue with a few oats added in to make it seem like it really was something nutritious to eat. No one ever really ate it; they probably recycled the ones that went in the garbage. “Maybe I’m going to give you something to think about in group today. You’ll see. Something that even the staff will care to listen to.”

A few minutes later, with the magic of twiddling their fingers and coughing and sneezing and the feeling of numbness and boredom, the staff called upon them that it was group, where Sonic thought it was where everyone got to hear about the soap opera of their lives. And the staff just got their popcorn and tuned to daytime television to hear about their abuse or their sadness or anything else that got their nerves grinding into motion and made them crying puddles. It was hospital policy for everyone to listen in on their pain, even if it was overly dramatized or made up. It was required participation in a daytime soap that Sonic knew he never liked to watch. That was what his mother tuned in every morning, and now he was forced to watch handsome men cry about their wives choosing a much more handsome man over them. Beauty was such a hard thing to fathom, the handsome men finally realized. They weren’t beautiful enough for the most beautiful woman in the world. Maybe that was what Knuckles wanted to talk about.

Maybe their minds were too beautiful for anyone to accept.

As the other ones discussed their problems and issues, Knuckles thought to himself, on the twining and fabrication of his tale, to make it so that everyone would listen with great interest. His mother, oh his mother, always said he had a thing for stories when he was young. Maybe he still had it in him. He wasn’t so sure, but he would take that fossilized skill from what seemed to be so long ago to use.

And finally, it was his turn to tell a sorrowful story. One he wished would stay in the minds of everyone who joined group for at least a few minutes, a few hours or days if he was lucky.

“Knuckles, you seem to be in a calm mood today. No anger or fighting. But you seem pretty glum. What has you so upset?”  
He shook his head. “Not really upset I guess, but I wanted to tell you all a story. One that I’ve heard that was given down to my family for generations, and I’m sure I’ll tell this to my son before I’m long gone. Hopefully I can get everyone’s attention in this, but I’m sure there are a few of you who probably don’t care to listen.” He looked at Nack and Bean, Nack too absorbed in himself and Bean unable to focus on anyone’s stories for longer than two minutes. He often fell asleep, but he always knew Bean was never attentive with anything in the hospital. Maybe you couldn’t win over everybody. Bean’s fingers twitched and he jumped up and down, looking at the clock every few minutes to see if their group time was up.  
“Well, we’ll try our best Knuckles. If this is something really important you want to share with us, this can be an important step to your recovery. You can share the story with us if it means something to you.”  
“I only wish for people to listen in because this hospital is boring enough as it is without group therapy, having us listen to everyone’s dramas and watching what it’s like in their life, and maybe I might not share what happened in my life, but more like stories my family has made for years and years that lie important life lessons we should all learn. And maybe if the young ones, like Bean, and especially Bean, needs to listen, because some of you need to at least recover a little to not make the same mistakes over and over again. And I’ve heard that insanity is simply trying the same thing expecting different results, and well, that’s honestly why we’re here. If we can at least learn from doing those same things, maybe we’ll become a tiny bit saner and a tiny bit going back to our homes and our families. At least a little progress is better than none.”

He took a deep breath, sitting back and watching the particles drift on the sunbeams that were sneaking through the blinds, and he told his story.

“There was once a boy who was born onto a family with six other brothers. They were given very strange names because, quite simply, their mother was very strange. They were called Black, Gray, White, Silver, Iron, Lead, and Pearly. The boy was named Dusky. He was given that name simply because it was dusk when he was born. None of them were even black or gray or white. They were just red, like normal echidnas. Red, like me. Their mother was simply obsessed with monochrome colors.

“Their mother was a painter. And she was actually colorblind. Most of her paintings were painted in gray and black and white along with a simple color she chose from her palette randomly. Unfortunately, none of her paintings ever sold, which brought her and her eight children to poverty. They lived in a farm that couldn’t afford to feed their animals and plant their crops. Which meant that most of the animals were starving. The goats ate the only grass there was in the farm, to the point that they would even eat the dirt, creating mud patches that the goats would often trip and break their legs. Many of the animals were injured and crazy because of the lack of food and medical help that the brothers hated to feed the animals of whatever they could, because they would ram right into them and attack them and fight to get every last morsel of food they could. Some said they might as well kill the animals if they were suffering so much. But mother said no. They would get the money they need if her next painting was a major hit in New York museums and they would eat the finest food and have the finest furniture and house and the finest everything, and the only thing they had to do was wait. Waiting was key to the eight sons, and if they were patient, God would provide.

“Their mother really was a lovely woman, but she was weak and frail, and she suffered from a severe mental condition that also distorted her very view on reality. Her paintings were often very abstract and told stories of a mind that was slowly deteriorating from decay, but the bigwigs in New York weren’t interested in her work. They called it garbage. They called it ‘feces for the mind’. But it never got her to stop painting. Oh God that woman. She would paint no matter what people said about her work. She kept saying her next work was going to be the biggest thing in the New York Museum of Art. So she kept trying. And one day, while she didn’t necessarily hit it big, she did get a handful of money from some book company to use her latest painting to be a cover of a book. They weren’t a bigwig from New York, but it was still enough to eat well for the next couple of days. So their mother smiled and couldn’t wait to tell her children of the news, that they would be able to operate their farm like normal farmers for a while, and maybe in the end, everything was going to be okay. Everything was going to be alright.

And they were prosperous for a while. A few animals got the veterinary care they needed. No more ramming and running them over demanding food; there was plenty to eat, eat my animal brothers, eat, because it will be your last good meal in this life. 

Dusky however, was always a little short, always a step behind his seven brothers. Sometimes they even teased him and ate his food and called him all kinds of nasty names. You know, the usual: faggot, dumbass, shorty, idiot, you all know how it is. A lot of people in here were probably picked on, and that’s probably one of the main reasons on why we’re in here. Dusky felt very affected by their teasings and their name-calling and he always felt that his brothers were just lazy ignorant asses who truly didn’t want to work for their mother and the farm. Most of them complained about feeding the animals and cleaning the stalls and tending to the very few crops they had. But Dusky wanted to do all he could for his mother. Because he wasn’t sure what it was, but there was something that he loved dearly about his mother, and he was willing to prove to his seven brethren that he was as good as them. Dusky was a little weak, Dusky was a little short, but the brothers, what did they know? He would show them that he was the hardest worker here. He would let them know who truly loved his mother.

“However, one day, Dusky noticed his mother acting strangely. A little stranger than usual, anyways. This day, she painted a black and red painting of a crow with a torn heart, as if it was made out of felt and fabric. She mumbled something that crows were all bad luck and that they should be torn away from this world, much like their hearts. Nothing could explain her sudden phobia of crows. Every time she heard one cawing at her, she would scream profanities and throw her lead paint at it. One of them had the very tip of its wings red because of the paint she pitched at it, but it only flew away, not fazed at all by her belligerence. Dusky didn’t know that this was the starting point of a very serious chain of events that he thought he would never forget, not even if he was 90 and his decayed brain was about to be torn of their memories like the crow’s heart, like little seams and thread and needles and bits of fabric being frayed by age and children playing with it.

“The next day, Dusky’s oldest brother, Black, was proclaimed dead by his mother. None of the brothers knew what happened to him. Only their mother knew, and she claimed she didn’t even know what killed him. She said he had a terrible disease that made some men come in who were wearing crow hats and they pried him of blood with leeches. Dusky wasn’t sure of what his mother was talking about, but as soon as he left the home and went to tend to the animals, he saw them. Terrible creatures they were! They deprived innocent men of their blood and said there wasn’t much we can do Ms. Monochrome, I’m afraid your son is going to die, but hey, thanks for the blood donation your son has made! I’m very sure it’ll prove useful to the battles against much more horrible diseases. They wore wide red rubied eyes and a beak and skin made out of black leather, with wings made from steel and tin. One of them drove by the farm, staring at his family with its glossy jewels, and they only held their briefcase filled with blood like the finest wine and drove away. Dusky believed that these men existed, and it might’ve been a crazy thought, but he thought they were injecting things into his brothers and making them sick, making them deprived of all their fluids and making them suffer and taking their organs to hospitals for a rich amount of money. Not like his brothers had the finest organs anyways, especially not their stomachs, as shrunken as they were, but he was sure they were after them all the same.

Dusky called them the Injection Crows. They would hide in the night and injected you full of sodium thiopental and trackers to spy on you and to take your blood and organs, or just simply to do experiments on you. As he fell asleep every night, he thought he could see their beaked faces, glaring at him and clicking their fingers on the hypodermic needles. The Injection Crows always blended into the night, where they were practically invisible, as the stars and blackness cloaked them. They were government spies all right, spying on a poor family who lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere in Oakland. But why? he asked. Why would they want to spy on us? We were just simply simple kids with a not so simple mother.

“His mother sang every night when she made a piece, working in the late hours to get the bigwigs in New York to notice. He tried to sleep but once again he found himself thinking of the Crows, possibly injecting trackers subcutaneously into his body. Dusky was the special one, wasn’t he? He was the special little boy that his mother especially loved. Of course they wanted his blood and his organs, especially his heart, filled with the love it had. The moon’s light shined and brightened the contours of his room, including the man with the leather beak and the ruby eyes and the needle. As Dusky gasped, carrying his breath, and wishing for him to leave their farm, he simply said nothing and silently walked past him like a sulking shadow. He was too terrified to get up from his bed and stop him. What if he was too strong for him? No one could tell what strength this group entirely had! The crow man chortled, and disappeared into the dark galaxy of the rest of his room, into the other planets of the other boys’ rooms.

The crows that are hid by the night  
Their beaks, their steely beaks, are as sharp as knifes!  
If you don’t watch where they fly  
They will stab your heart  
And then you will die!  
You will die, you will die  
Before you got to see the bony moon of night!

“His mother’s voice was the voice of creaky angels, of angels with lungs made of glass, as she sang the song that she made on a whim, talking of the stars that were secretly the whites of crow beaks, looking like the solid steel of knives and swords, ready to kill, ready to take the lives of their unsuspecting victims. Their wings were black like the night, their eyes were moons, so you could never tell where they stabbed you from, and Dusky imagined them stabbing his brothers with very sharp needles, full of that deadly miracle drug that whisked them away to a painless sleep, the drug that his mother was taking as a stress reliever, called sodium thiopental.

And on that next day, his second oldest brother, Lead, was dead.

“Once again, no details at all. Except the same: the crow men came in and snatched him up says his mother. The rest of the brothers wondered if they were next, oh poor ol’ Black and Lead! They never had much of a chance! Dusky thought, oh what wondrous fools, how they do not know of the Injection Crows who harvest their organs and blood and even their skin to make their leather hats out of! So he told them the entire story of the crow men, and how worried they should be of them. And petrified they were when they tried to sleep at night. They were simply sinking stones in an ocean, staying in one place, waiting for the next brother to be killed. And the same happened under Dusky’s scared little white eyes: the crow men came in, was absorbed by the dark wallowing spaces in his room, and on the very next morning, Iron was dead.

Same thing happened that morning, as what happened those last two mornings. The crow men, the crow men, the crow men. Dusky now was beginning to feel guilty for not preventing his brothers from dying, and maybe when that crow man was about to inject Iron and Lead and Black with whatever death cocktail they gave them, he could’ve prevented the death of them. He wasn’t sure if his strength was enough to stop them, but he might as well have done something to make sure his brothers didn’t die anymore. He was no longer going to be the weak, stupid Dusky that everyone thought he was. He was going to be a protector for the rest of his brothers. And he would show them all the true identity of the Injection Crows.

It was night again, as the moon displayed its sharp fingers of light all over his room. And within minutes of him about to fall asleep, he saw one of the Injection Crows, clicking his needle against his tin fingers, ready to kill the next brother in his family. And Dusky got up, even if he was in the throes of sleep, and he tried to chase after him, but the crowman was too fast, too swift, as he disappeared into the places where the moon couldn’t pry its fingers in.

The crows that are hid by the night  
Their eyes, their steely eyes, are as all-seeing as the sun’s light!  
If you don’t watch where they look  
They will find out you have a deadly secret  
You will be booked, you will be booked!  
By the policemen who don’t care for your life!

Next morning, Gray died.

“The brothers were all beginning to get suspicious of their mother. Everyday it was the same old story, that their mother might as well be a broken record or a mockingbird that echoed the same words everyday as they died, and she seemed to show no sorrow for their deaths. Only madness, as her paintings began to become more intricate, more imbued with colors. The brothers thought, and they thought that the killer of their brothers was really their mother, who was killing them because she was slowly turning insane with her mental disorder, as more colors began to shine in her vision. They thought that if their mother killed all of them, she would find color again, and her paintings would sell. It seemed like a very strange, but yet logical explanation. Their mother was the culprit. But how could they stop her? They had no phone. They couldn’t call the police. They simply could only tell one of the vets and hoped that they would listen and let them call the police for them.

But Dusky thought differently. “My brothers! I think the reason why our other brothers are dying are because of the Injection Crows! They’re hiding in the night and killing her sons slowly. Surely our mother couldn’t be blamed for this, right? She can’t be! She loves us so much! She gives us a roof over our heads and she tries to give us food and care whenever she can! Why are you blaming our mama into this? Why?”

“Because she’s insane now, Dusky,” Pearly said. “She’s insane and you know it. She cares more about her paintings than us. Art has fully absorbed her now, and she is willing to do whatever she can to please that monster and those damn bigwigs in New York. She’s a monster and I know she is trying to kill us all so she can fully pay attention to her paintings and get color back in her eyes. Don’t you see you damn idiot? We know. We all know.”

But Dusky wouldn’t listen. He saw the Injection Crows right before his very eyes! He knew that his mother wasn’t the one killing all of them! Under her insanity, there was truth, and he knew it was the truth that so many people were blind to see.

“But when he fell asleep that night, he caught no trace of the Injection Crows. They were simply shrouded by the night. And the next morning, Silver was dead. And the only brothers left were Pearly, White, and Dusky.

And still, they noticed that their mother didn’t grieve, but only rambled about the crow men. Dusky still held on that the Injection Crows were still around, waiting to kill the very last of them, and Dusky thought that soon, he would be the next one in line to get an injection that would kill him. The number was dwindling down, so surely, he was next.

But the same thing happened the next morning. He fell asleep, not seeing anything of the Injection Crows (why, they were getting sneakier and sneakier by the moment he said!) and Pearly died. Only two brothers remained, as they buried their brother in the corn fields. They weren’t growing much corn anyways they said. They might as well use it as a burial ground for the rest of their brothers. And as they shoveled dirt in his grave, Dusky wanted to dedicate himself to preserving the memory of his brothers by capturing one of the Injection Crows and proving that their mother was innocent and that these shadowy men truly did exist. And he would be the guardian to White, and maybe he would even save himself. After all, he was possibly next in line for the kill.

And he tried to stay up all that night, drinking so much of his mother’s coffee, being on the lookout for the Injection Crows. They always came along in the darkness, with their hypodermic needle in one hand and a briefcase for storing organs and records in the other. Dusky waited by his bed, waiting for the slender masks to appear in the early morning’s blush. And finally, when he thought his eyes deceived him, he saw him. The crow that was planning on murdering White.

The crows that are hid by the night  
Their wings, their steely wings, they catch the air and seal it tight!  
If you don’t watch where they glide  
They will take your head completely clean off its stump  
You will be sliced, you will be sliced!  
Your blood will look so nice on the pale sheets of white!

“He rocketed from his bed and charged at him and pinned him against the ground. Even though Dusky was small, he was able to put the crow between the floor and his body for a very long time, squirming to be free and cursing under his mask. And the crowman said, ‘Why are you interfering with our plans, boy? I’m ordered by the government to kill your brother to help patients who need his organs, and fast!’  
‘You’re not going to kill White!’ he pleaded. ‘No one is going to kill any more of my brothers while I’m around! Why are you targeting us for organs! We’re just a farming family in the middle of nowhere! Our organs aren’t that special! Why are you doing this?’  
‘Well, quite simply my boy, if I take organs from a family in the middle of nowhere, no one, not even the media, is going to notice. No one cares about your family in this world, not even the fucking bigwigs in New York. So your family is a perfect target for us to take organs from. Next up is your brother White, then you, then your mother, until this family is wiped completely clean and then we can use all your organs to help people who really need them. You are the scum of the earth, Dusk. No one cares about any of you. Once we wipe you out, no one will ever hear of you again, and not even care. You have no friends. You have no one in the media or Hollywood or anyone with a name everyone knows to even know you or care about you. The loss is nothing. So I shall take your brother into my hands and I’ll cure Miss Hildebrandt of her cancer. Step aside, boy. You are nothing anymore.’

Dusky was too shocked over his words to even continue pinning the man down. He was absorbed by the darkness, and the next morning, White died by the death cocktail and the pinprick. And Dusky was the only one left, and the only one left to die.

“Dusky awaited the day he would die. He zoomed in on the Crowman’s words, that he was simply nothing in this world, and that it wouldn’t stop for him if he died. He asked this of his mother, if she would care if he was dead, but she only continued to paint, of every color but yellow. Yellow was the only color she ever needed now.

And the night arose again, and Dusky waited, and waited. The whole room was silent, and the whole room was nearly dark. He knew the world was against him tonight, and soon it would laugh and smile once he died and continue spinning under the sun’s warm guidance. But he thought that tonight, he wouldn’t go down without a fight. He found one of the farm’s shotguns and took it under his arm and under his pillow, and he waited for the Injection Crow to come out of the dark, waiting to kill him.

The crows that are hid by the night  
Their claws, their sharp black claws!  
If you don’t watch where they fight  
Your heart will be wretched free from your chest  
It will beat! It will beat!  
Your chest will no longer discover love’s blight!

And he appeared. The moon glared on his silver wings made of machine metal and chiseled tin and his leather mask painted black and his gemmed eyes, and on one hand he carried a needle, and on the other, a briefcase that said so obviously in the light HEARTS. Today the crowman would take his heart, and feed it to a celebrity who really needed it, as if they needed more as they already drank the blood of the poor as fine wine. The crow was ready to inject him with the death cocktail, a high dose of morphine, and he was singing the songs of the Lord, to put poor little Dusky to relaxation as he killed him.

But Dusky was ready. He revealed his gun under the pillow and fired at the crowman, but because of the darkness, he missed. The crowman’s anger was now visible as he cursed, seeing that for the first time one of his ‘clients’ was armed, and he melted into the darkness and ran into the barnyard, attempting to escape, knowing that he couldn’t kill him if he was only armed with a needle.

The crows that are hid by the night…  
Hid by the night…  
Hid by the night…

But Dusky thought it wouldn’t be the end of that. Not so, my fellow listeners! Not so. He carried his gun out of the room and followed suit, looking into the fine white, spider webbed thin lines he could see in the black night. He chased him into the horse’s stable, where the crowman spread his dusty wings again and his ruby eyes gleamed, and he said, ‘Enough boy. I didn’t know you had to make this so difficult with me. Put the gun down and we can make a deal. If I take one of your organs, I can give you a fine sum of money. What say I give you 5,000 dollars? 6,000? 7,000? That would be enough to take care of your farm and feed your mother and you for a long time! And then maybe I can take your eyes and I can give you 10,000 for that. What say you? Can I take your vision and I can give you 10,000 dollars? Trust me, you’ll be rich boy. You will no longer be knee-deep in poverty. You will be someone.’

Their eyes, their steely eyes…

“’I don’t need money to be someone. I don’t need your money and you don’t need to be in my life, killing all my brothers. I am with no one but my mother now, and you’re a murderer, whether you work with the government or not, whether you’re made of money or not. I’m going to kill you, and I will avenge the deaths of my brothers. Goodbye, you damn Injection Crow. It was nice knowing your damn existence, and I’m sure the world won’t stop for you either.’

And he pulled the trigger of his gun, and with a loud blast, it fired. The hot metal of the bullet seared through his body and his heart, and the crowman began to bleed and his body was no longer wired in perfect knots and the wine he wanted to cater to the rich was spilling. The crowman held his heart and knew that he had to do something, fast and quick and with the most ample of hands, or he would die and the world and its money wouldn’t stop for him like they wouldn’t stop for this hick and his fucking brothers. So he opened the briefcase even if his hands shook and quaked, and he held a heart, a heart that Dusky thought belonged to one of his brothers. Possibly Pearly or White.

And he brandished a sewing needle and tore his old heart with a seam cutter, the clothed heart filled with tears and stains and holes chewed from rats that lived inside the man’s body. And like a knitter, he sewed White’s heart inside his body, with the most careful of eyes and precision, as quickly as he could to stop the bleeding from the metallic hole in his body.

If you don’t watch where they look…

“Dusky wasn’t looking at the crowman recovering from his bullet wound. He gazed at something that was more wondrous to him than a mysterious man looking for his brother’s organs who worked for the government dressed up like a crow, like a freak of nature. And it was horse shit. Under the moon’s light, it shined like an opal under the gem-studded night, and he thought how wondrous this world was, that horse shit was even beautiful under God’s eyes. And the flies flickering around and devouring it, how amazing that there was even a creature who would devour the very shit of animals that came out of their very asses! The fly’s mouth sputtered acid to eat the glossy colors, and the world was such in perfect harmony that very night. A piece of shit being devoured by an even bigger piece of shit of an animal known as the fly.

They will find out you have a deadly secret!

And he thought as he looked at these miracles, ‘Even the biggest pieces of shit have matter in the world. Once they die, they fertilize the earth, and the earth stops for everyone who dies and eats their bodies like a fly’s acid. The whole world? It was nothing but a giant brown steaming pile of horse shit. And he learned a valuable lesson that day. A lesson he kept with for the rest of his life. And soon, he forgot all about his brothers, all about his mother, and he lived a life that was happy and successful without drinking the blood of the poor like the biggest piece of shit that ever lived, the fly.

YOU WILL BE BOOKED! YOU WILL BE BOOKED!

THE POLICE WILL GET YOU!

MURDERER!

LIAR!

FRAUD!

PHONY!

SPEAK THE TRUTH; SPEAK THE TRUTH FOR ALL THESE BONY LITTLE LOONS!

And that’s the end of my story. I hope all of you enjoyed that. I’m planning to make a novel out of it, and I’m sure it would be a huge fucking bestseller. You would see my name on the big print on the book: Taurino ‘Knuckles’ Guardia. I’ll be big, baby. Bigger than what fucking Dr. Splinter is. I guarantee it.”

The entire room was in silence, the only sound audible was the birds twittering outside in the Austin sun. No one said a word for a few moments, not even one of the staff or Bean, until finally, Nack, the purple weasel, spoke.

“Man, that was probably the biggest ‘fuck you’ I ever heard in a goddamn story like that. Why the hell did you tell us that? Are you trying to be a fucking Capote or some shit?”  
“I’m bigger than Capote, Nack. I’m bigger than Shakespeare. I’m bigger than any writer who has ever shat out a goddamn 500-page manuscript full of wordy bullshit. Taurino Guardia. That’s my name. I’ll be known in history as the greatest story writer in fucking existence. None of you appreciated my fucking story? Well, fuck all of you. If a goddamn celebrity could write out pieces of bullshit, I can too!” 

The moon’s white hood of bone will watch you too, not just the crows…

The final words from his mouth were screamed out, clambering from his throat and into the ears of everyone in the room, making their eardrums pierced. Sonic watched as the staff took Knuckles away from the group room, directing him to the padded cells, the comfort of the white pillows and the frosty lights. They didn’t inject him with Thorazine or put him in restraints much like Sonic was, as they only led him in and he opened the door, then prepared to punch the pads and scream out unintelligible words, until he held his head between his red fists and cried.

Sonic never knew what the story meant, and if it truly meant anything to Knuckles. He simply thought of it as nonsense and a sudden break in insanity. 

The clock struck 11, which the staff knew was “free time”. As they were led out of the group room, he could still hear Knuckles’ sobs echoing from the hallways like rantings of the depressed and panic-stricken patients.

And then you will die! You will die!  
Before you got to see the bony moon of night!


	14. Bark's Story; Smirk, the Man with No Face

I never was insane to begin with. Not that insane, anyways. I never was diagnosed with a mental disorder ever in my life. Not even for anxiety. But yet here I am, in this shitty place.

It all was a mistake. A very simple mistake that simple people make. Right when some people notice you’ve been acting “strange”, they automatically assume you’re crazy. I’m not much of a talker, but I know one thing I’m not, and that’s crazy. 

I simply never talked to people because my own mother told me to listen to everyone with your heart. And well, I followed her advice. My mother is a very wise woman, but she doesn’t exactly live in the best of ways, and I hope one day I can help her. However, I can’t help her ever since I’ve been in this piece of shit hospital for quite a while now. About seven months, they said. But I can’t even count those months anymore simply because it seems like it’s been far too long since I’ve been in here. Hell lasts for an eternity, and it’s just pure suffering for years and years and years, and I feel like that’s what this hospital is. Dr. Splinter is the devil himself, and I think I once saw him with a forked tongue and a demonic tail. His pens are probably pitchforks too. And once you’re in here, you’re signing a contract with your soul, and you can never have it back, not even if you somehow found a loophole in the system. Once you make it out of here alive, you don’t feel the same. Your soul is already sucked out of you and Dr. Splinter already ate it with his pitchfork ravenously. And unfortunately, I feel like I’ve changed a lot since I’ve been in this hospital, physically and mentally.

I haven’t been eating as much. Too nervous these days. I always look like shit too, even if I actually was calm enough to take a shower. They gave me some Xanax, but I honestly don’t take it very much. I often just give it to some of the other patients who seem to need it, especially that bat girl who sometimes trades me candy she got from somewhere for them. While it may seem like a stupid trade, I really miss the taste of sweets, especially Crunch bars, and Rouge always seems to have them by the handful. A Crunch bar is a moment of heaven for a few seconds away from this godawful place. They’re the only key to being sane in such a world. Rouge has a very rough history, but we often talk a lot (usually I just nod, but I listen to her words all the same) and she says this place makes her very lonely and she was glad someone like me came by. She did offer sex, but I told her she needed to be better at controlling her urges, as all they ever did was remind her of her past. She agreed, and once again said I was a very good friend. The only one who cared to listen to her. I felt like she was the only one who bothered hanging around me because I was so quiet, other than Bean. And Bean I don’t even talk to often. He talks to himself. Right when he goes on about fire I actively tune it out. Bean is a guy with serious problems, but I’m too afraid to mention that to him, or to anyone else really. A lot of people here have a lot of fucking problems, and that’s an understatement. Nack is a major asshole, Amy is definitely anorexic (I see her going on by without eating so much as a morsel of food), Bean is a pyromaniac who pisses his bed every single day and makes my room smell like a nursing home (but this place is like a nursing home too, because everyone is just so ready to die any day now), Blaze never wants to talk to anyone, Knuckles gets pissed off all the time and always causes a commotion in the day room (especially when I’m trying to read), and Sonic…Sonic just seems like he’s always on the verge of laughing his fucking head off and then shooting himself in the head with a gun. I never thought I would be in such a place with such loonies, but maybe my girlfriend was a loony too. Because she thought I was like them. Because her eyes cannot see the man who I truly am.

It all started when I made a depressed comment. In my defense, I was very stressed out. I had so many bills to pay, I wasn’t even sure if I could pay my rent on time, my mother needed to be taken care of and I wasn’t even sure if I could get to help her before it was too late, and I said to her, “Jesus Christ, sometimes I feel like getting a gun and ending it all, you know?”

And ever since I said that, I’ve ended up here. In this place where everyone forgot to sing, the whole lot of loonies. My girlfriend considered me dangerously suicidal and aggressive. But yet I never acted out towards the staff when I was admitted. I just walked calmly to my room, even if on the first day I saw that Amy Rose girl crying her head off and Blaze rubbing the leather seats again. They always seemed to do that like clockwork, every day. Blaze running her fingers across it as if she was blind and she was reading Braille, Amy crying about her weight or about something else I don’t know of as if there’s too much water in her body, every 9 AM, 12 PM, 3 PM. I swear, they’re like machines. You press a button, and they’ll cry, or they’ll try to distract themselves with something. I met Bean on my first day too. Turns out so far he’s been in here for about a year, and I can see why. He told me he burnt down a forest and he wanted his foster parents to pay. About what? He never said. And always I have to deal with him causing trouble because of his damned ADHD or whatever he was diagnosed with. Sometimes those ADHD kids just need a swift kick in the ass, and Bean looks like he’s due for some. No joke.

I keep a journal here from Dr. Splinter. It’s because I don’t want him hearing my true thoughts. I had him tricked that I was retarded or a deaf mute or something and the idiot completely believed it. Dr. Splinter is really not a very good doctor. He’s the worst kind of doctor you can have, actually. The staff doesn’t realize that there are so many patients in here that died of a sudden heart attack or heart failure and they fail to connect the dots. To wipe the window of dirt and see how much of that dirt belonged to Dr. Splinter. He’s pure evil incarnated. From what I heard from some of the older patients who were either actually discharged (they were so fucking lucky) or killed was that there was actually an old tale of a patient who was in here longer than anyone combined. I think it was about ten or twenty years he was with Dr. Splinter, and he actually eventually killed himself by biting off his own tongue. And I believe it. It’s honestly a sad tale and the fact that this hospital never helped anyone rings true. I’ve heard Dr. Splinter actually used to be a good and revolutionary doctor a long time ago, but something happened to him. He lost that spark. He lost that vitality in his eyes. He became insane too they said. And he spends most of his life making other patients’ lives hell. And I don’t think any of the staff know this. They’re honestly trying to do their best in helping everyone, but they don’t know of his rule, his tyranny.

My name is Bark. I’m 23 years old, and although you might think I’m a loser for writing this, but I lived with my mother for a long time. Not because I refused to get a job or anything like that, but it was actually because my mother was my best friend for the longest time. No one understood me more than her. No one knew what ailed me than my mother. No one knew my secrets, my fears, my pain, and my joys than my mother. She was an angel, someone who had wings made out of glass from the church windows, a colorful display as light hit her wings, the refractions of yellow blue and red and the images of Jesus Christ himself, and I’d like to one day be with my mother again and help her through her pain, through her darkest times, but I fear the worst may have already happened. I feared that she might be dead already, suffocated in her dismal treasures.

My mother is a hoarder. Or so the media likes to call her. She thinks everything she has in her house is a treasure. Broken wine bottles, bags of dog shit she never managed to put away in the trash, so many cans of expired food, along with her many puppets that she has displayed all over the house. My mother used to be a puppeteer for children all her life, and puppets were her passion and the one thing she lived for, because it was the key to get children laughing and happy, even if their lives were just as shitty as mine right now. But now every time I go into her house, the puppet’s button eyes would always gaze at me questionably, as if they’re wondering why I’m doing this to her, why I was making my mother suffer. And it makes me want to cry sometimes. I never wanted this to happen to my mother. I always wanted her to be just as happy as I was with her, but I know deep inside, she’s hurting deeply, a wound that seems invisible to her, and I want her to know that I am her son, and I will always be a step behind her, and I will always take care of her much like she tries to take care of me. I couldn’t complain about my childhood either. It was happy, full of laughter and tears and grins and disappointments and wonder, much like anyone else’s normal childhood memories. But God, just please don’t let her suffer anymore with this trash and mess! The wound is just getting larger and larger, and I can imagine her crying at night everyday about it, about how her house always reeks of cat piss and how she never could get this house as spotless as it used to be again. And I know this was all caused when I finally realized I had to split from my mother, to get a life of my own. As much as I loved her, I couldn’t imagine spending all my life with her, so I had to leave and live in an apartment with a roof that sometimes leaks and with a roommate that always has AC/DC music playing so loud that I can’t get to sleep in the starless nights that always leave my eyes tired and sore and red. As much as I hate it here, I had to do it for my own good. I would have people accusing me of sucking my mother’s very own teat. And I could never face the scorn of my friends, no matter how hard I try to ignore them.   
Sometimes I feel ashamed of my own faults, but they will be there, regardless, and this is how humans and animals alike will react once hearing of their faults and that they’re not perfect and there are things they’re embarrassed of.

I work, but I also box once in a while as a hobby, and I hope one day I can be a pro-boxer, but it’s probably a pipe dream with how many hours I work. And usually it’s never enough. I have to keep walking to that factory, producing more screws, producing more lug nuts and bolts, and get my hands dirty and greasy and filled with gray film, otherwise I can’t pay the bills and I can’t pay my mother’s bills. I’m sure if I was a professional boxer that would be the answer to my problems, but I cannot hold onto a dream such as this and expect it to work. Dreams are not tangible objects. They are thin, airy, and slippery, and if you don’t have a very good grip on them (which is very hard to muster), then it won’t get you anywhere. And the only dream I could honestly hold onto was of my mother, and to be with her until I know soon her final days will be coming, and she spends those final days in happiness and peace. She taught me so much, and I will never forget her. The rainbow of church glass windows of my life, my inspiration, my angel, my mother. 

But as I stared at these black veined windows, I’m afraid that soon, I will not see her in her final days. It is raining outside, and I see the thunder stretching the skies apart with its mighty, white hands, and I know that I cannot spend the storms with my mother anymore, or with my girlfriend who sent me here. I am very lonely, and I think the only one who has ever understood me in this hospital is Rouge, as I think there are traits in her that remind me of my own mother. She swore she didn’t want to have sex with me, but she wanted me to lie across from her body in bed and just think and watch the golden orbs of the streetlights outside the window soon fade to the bright scarlet and rosy pink cheeked morning and we just talk. We just talk about our own philosophies and the things we want to do when we get out. Rouge isn’t sure she says, but I told her maybe she just needed to be in a better hospital than this place.

“I cannot trust a man such as Dr. Splinter, and a man who takes away my privilege to smoke cigarettes. Those are some of the most dangerous men I know of Bark, and some of them are trying to control America right now.”  
And I told her I knew.  
“You’re a strange animal Bark, but at least you’re not dangerous. You don’t have one aggressive bone in your body, except if you’re boxing. Why did your girlfriend say you were aggressive? Didn’t she love you?”  
“No,” I said.  
“Then why did you choose her out of all the women out there in the world?”  
“Because she was the only one I could see myself with.”  
“And why?”  
“Because I knew I didn’t deserve any better. Because my mother is dying, and there’s nothing I can do for her. For a man to leave her mother suffering, I cannot think of a crueler man than that.”  
“Than Dr. Splinter and a man who tries to control everyone by sticking his nose into what drugs a person can and cannot use?”  
“Yes Rouge. Yes.”

We watched the sun rise, peeking its head and making the light break into our window with streaks of tangerine. We fell asleep in the same bed soon after, hearing the gentle breathing and the gentle heartbeats and the gentle rise and fall of the Austin cityscape beyond us, and soon the staff noticed us and I was put on restriction, but as soon as I was off it I would visit Rouge again, and we would talk again by lying on her bed and hearing and seeing everything the universe had to offer to us. The sun was the greatest gift God could give to our planet, giving life to everything it touches, but it cannot even give life to this damned hospital, as all I see are misery and death. But maybe there would be some kind of hope that we all could get out of here, into either another hospital that will actually help us or into our lives. And I feel like unless my mother has died, there is nothing more I couldn’t face, because I’ve seen what fear’s own face looks like, and I realize after you stare at it for so long, it’s not quite so scary anymore. And when you toyed with the idea of death so many times in your head, you realize that that, too, is no longer so scary. Everyone in this hospital all wishes for their death, to be freed of the chains that continue to pinion us to the wall, and to the red hot surface of the sun and to fly to it with our wings like Icarus, our wings made out of wax and feathers, we are no longer afraid of Dr. Splinter and his death machine, and he can try that shock therapy on me if he would like, but I am an animal that has seen misery at its greatest, unfathomable blackest pit, and I am ready for whatever he will throw at me. It will only be euphoria, elation, as I visit heaven with my mother. This I believe.

7/19/09

Bark Kapler

“It’s time for your medicine, Bark. We decided to up your Xanax a little.”  
He said nothing.  
“You know, you never said a single word to me since I started monitoring your medicine. Is it because you don’t like me or you don’t like the rest of the staff or the rest of the patients?”  
He said nothing.  
“I would like to hear your thoughts on a lot of things, Bark. I want to know who you really are as a person, inside. And then maybe we can help you. I don’t know if we should prescribe you another medicine than Xanax since your girlfriend has confirmed you have anxiety and aggression problems, because you literally haven’t said so much as a single word to both Dr. Robotnik and Dr. Splinter.”  
He said nothing.  
“What do you think of me? Do you think I’m pretty?”  
He said nothing.  
“What do you think of your friend Bean? Do you like him?”  
He said nothing.  
“And what about this hospital? Is it a nice place?”  
“No,” he said. “It sucks. It sucks like a donkey’s ass.”

 

—-

Soon, the cold, white lights in the hospital became darkness, then it became a small shimmering tube of many colors as Sonic faced the machine again, with Miles and Big, ready to enter the world of Wonderland. The machine murmured, it groaned, and it popped out more food for the prisoners it held. Another large fish and another peanut butter sandwich with a carton of milk. It groaned and hissed and spat, blowing off steam, the cigarette breaks it took when Miles and Big had to take their two hour break. To eat. To sleep. Then once those two hours were over, Miles had to go back to it and tend to the machine, his mechanical lord and savior, and it would groan and murmur and hiss again, and sometimes he felt like it spoke to him.

As much as Sonic wished to destroy the mechanical god, Big ate the large tray full of fish ravenously, as he always found the breaks between breakfast lunch and dinner so grueling, and Miles tried to keep his blue eyes open as they discussed what their plan was when they entered their second mission in Wonderland, but he was very tired, only getting two hours of sleep in a day. There was only so much that the little fox had to worry about. The past. It was always there, trying to swallow him whole, as much as Big was swallowing his fried fish and his peas and his carton of milk. He missed his mother’s sweet embrace, his father’s kind words, the sweet cinnamon smell that always rose in the air every Christmas when they would discuss how they were about to enter their grandmother’s house and how they got such a large gift for the little fox, but they didn’t mind how much it cost, because they loved him, don’t we dear?

He took small bits of his peanut butter sandwich and scattered them on the plate. Sonic wasn’t sure why he was doing this, but this child was broken, and needed intensive repair. He looks as if he barely ate inside the hospital, and even if he did try to sleep every two hours, he was always woken up by night terrors on the day his mother and father died, and he always thinks the murderer is coming to get him, and he was going to be another one who was dead in the head. The machine clicked and whispered and moaned between their discussions, trying to get their attention, but always the machine failed, and always he would have to try harder next time. The colors swirled above them, their silhouettes marked on the ground, one absorbing other shadows as they raced across the bright contours of the room, with their little fins and their little glass eyes they always saw the world muddied and blurry, one arched and dejected, its horns slowly dissolving away as he once was proud of the life he was given and now the devil had taken that away from him, and one that was slowly trying to build the chasm between them, the bridge to mutual understanding, a gateway to his heart and his pain and the worms that were slowly wriggling through his heart, eating every single one of his veins away.

“Miles, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but…why is it that you look so miserable all the time? What’s eating you? Why are you just splitting your sandwich into pieces and not doing me a favor and putting it in your mouth and eat it? We’re going to need all the energy we can get while we’re on this mission. We might face monsters as strong as Mr. Todd. I got more information about this and turns out edge of the world to where this guy is at are quite a long ways ahead. But they said I have to go there, because he has something very important to give me and some information about the rest of the land. You’re going to need to try to get some rest too; we’re going to be there for a while. So tell me, why are you so glum? You’re eight, right? That’s supposed to be the time of your life!”  
“It used to been the time of my life, Sonic. Then it soon became a hell. Soon it became the death of me. Most eight year olds don’t talk like this. Not after what they’ve seen, not after what they’ve heard and what they’ve dealt with. I don’t think I ever deserve to eat except enough that will get me through the now, and right now I don’t need any. My stomach is just screaming to puke right now. I’m scared of this Wonderland Sonic; I was terrified of that creature we faced. And we have to deal with more creatures like him? I don’t know why I was chosen for this, not at all, and I wished I was back home.” He thought of the cinnamon smell wafting through the air. Bing Crosby singing on the radio, the white fluffs of ice falling down to the earth while he was inside his very warm home. He wished those times were back and he never was in this hospital. He wished for those times too much. And he felt hot tears stinging in his eyes as he faced him, with a fragment of a peanut butter sandwich in his hand, nearly smearing it on his face.

“But we can’t go back home, Tails. Not when Dr. Splinter is still around. He’ll keep you here and do all those nasty shock therapies on you again. He’ll probably lobotomize you once he’s done with you, and bam, you can die just like the rest of those sad souls, in a bell jar, and no one would ever see you again. And do you want that? Of course not. We have to keep fighting. We have to go through these missions in this very strange place and brave through it, or all hope is going to be lost, and I’m just as dead as you will be.”  
“Wait…” he said, his eyes wide and not clutched by crusts in his eye from the weariness of praying to his mechanical Jesus. “Did you just call me…Tails?”  
“Yes. Yes I did. It’s your nickname, because I noticed in this darkness that you have two tails. Like it? I think it’s a more suitable name for you than ‘Miles’. I know that’s what your parents named you and I know you miss them very much, but from now on, this will be your rebirth name, as from now on, I’m going to take care of you. I’m going to teach you that life isn’t this godawful all the time. In fact, it can be damn right enjoyable sometimes, and I want you to enjoy that moment in life with me. I absolutely don’t want to see you miserable all the time. You’re eight, just a kid, and you deserve so much better. I don’t know exactly on what happened to you, but…I wished that my parents were just as great as yours. They must’ve loved you very much for you to miss them this badly. And it’s the least I can do to help you, to try to get that happiness inside you again.”  
"Can you Sonic? Can you? I experienced too much in my life to be helped. I was rejected from God to have a happy life and now I receive shock treatments and I haven’t seen the sun in years. You have problems yourself. I don’t think I can be helped by a fellow patient, one who was sent here with mental problems to take care of. At least you were lucky enough to be sent to the Acutes, and not here.”

“Hey! I’m trying to help you here, Tails!” he yelled, as he couldn’t help but get annoyed at the little fox’s refusal. As Sonic gazed back at him, he thought he now barely knew how to eat, being stuck in here, not given enough food and not enough social activity. He was smearing peanut butter all over himself, as if he forgot where his mouth was. Was it on his face? Or his body? Or was it on his hand, or maybe even his ass? Who knew! He didn’t, and that was why he was experimenting, to smear peanut butter in places where he soon learned that wasn’t his mouth, as it wouldn’t automatically chew and swallow.  
“God, you probably don’t know how to eat either. Jesus Christ, I’m surprised Big even knows, he’s been in here for almost a decade.” As he held his head, he could feel and hear the sound and the jaggedness of his father’s voice, shouting do not speak the lord’s name in vain! He looked at Tails, who was confused and flustered on what exactly this thing called “food” was, he grabbed the sandwich, ripped a piece, and held it in front of him, the small brown liquid covering the small sparse of white dangling in front of him. “Just open your mouth. Trust me. This isn’t going to hurt you.”  
“But they put so many things in that food, Sonic! They put so many different kinds of medicines, so many trackers so Dr. Splinter knows where you are, so many things that make you sluggish and dead! I know about this place more than you do, little blue one, I’ve been in here for two years, and you’ve only been in here for about a few weeks! Dr. Splinter will get you. The King of Spades will get me. The Spades will get me. The Spades. How they dig the dirt and find the golden jewel underneath this hospital.”

He could feel the madness flowing out of his mouth, the words that flew from him and jangled in his eardrum. The insanity droning like many insects were inside his brain, stinging it, making it red and blemishing. Sonic could feel The End coming back, the grassy knoll with the dandelions and white fluff and the big black chasm that wished to take Tails away to a place where he would never return from was coming back, when he knew he had to take action now, or they would deal with this again. So he shoved the piece of the sandwich inside, muffling his shouts, and forced him to chew.

He was suddenly quiet as the food was inserted inside his lips. The insanity died down as he tasted the nutty, almost liquid, concoction, Tails noting that this was possibly the worst sandwich he ever ate in his life. He was then reminded that there were so many other sandwiches he ate, some that were better, some that were grand even, when his mother was still alive, oh how much of a great cook was she! But like a mood stabilizer (who knows, maybe a mood stabilizer really was inside the sandwich the whole time), he was quiet as he ate the rest of it, as he realized that his mouth was a gaping hole in his face with long white hardened rows and a soft pink organ that sensed as much as his fingers, and eating wasn’t such a bad thing after all. Big seemed to enjoy it, as he devoured everything on his tray and downed his milk in what seemed to be record time.

“So, are we ready to go now?” Big asked, his face full of fried fish crumbs. “I know that place is scary, but…if it means seeing my mama again someday, then I’m willing to help you, Mr. Sonic. Where’s Knuckie at? I thought he was supposed to be with us too!”  
He shook his head. “Unfortunately, Knuckles had a bit of an episode again, so I decided to not bring him with us. We’ll be fine as long as we’re careful, and if we see any monsters you have to help me too Big, as my shoulder still hurts like hell and I don’t trust Tails with the fighting just yet. Maybe someday he can help us in a big way, but for now he can just use his brain and guide us if we’re lost.” He stood up, then looked at Tails. “Are you ready buddy?”

He held out his hand. Even if his gloves were still stained with some blood from his recent suicide attempt, and Tails’ hands were still shaky with apprehension, Tails hesitated a little, uncertain, then he placed his palm into his, and they curled their fingers into the other, and he could feel the warmth that was emanating from the hedgehog, the optimism and kindness he had for the little fox that was so shaken, so distressed and so hurt, and he told him that with him around as his new best friend, everything about him that made him think and realize he was a Dead Head Fred was going away, and he smiled, and shook no more.

They walked together, bravely into the door of Wonderland, and the gargoyle lock decided to say nothing as to not ruin the bonding moment. Even he with his cynical mind thought this was a beautiful moment.

 

—

 

The world once again transformed from black to pink, red, green, and blue, with shards of so many different colors glowing like broken glass near a ceiling light in a basement that was dark and dank. They saw the origami cranes again, flying in the air with their small, folded wings made of rice paper, and they saw the little girl made of cubes, smiling and laughing as she picked up flowers that screamed and begged for mercy and bled as she picked them up, some of the red splashing and shading with the green, making it a near brown. Sonic talked to this little girl once and expected more of an absent response coming from her, but he thought maybe she knew where the edge of the world was at, and maybe she would give him a more appropriate answer. After all, Mr. Todd was dead and rotting into the earth, and she didn’t need to worry about him. Not anymore.

“Hey little girl, do you know somebody who lives by the end of the world here? They told me he has no face and he wears a hat and overcoat and he likes to smoke a lot of cigarettes. Have you seen him?”  
The little girl twisted the flower’s stem, to break all of the bones in its body, to make it become dead and cease screaming. “Umm…yes, I’ve seen him! He likes to visit a boy who looks like me too! I’ve seen him go…that way!” she said, as she pointed west. “But he’s very strong, and knows how to fight these types of beasts that live near the moon shines boldly on the cliff near the sea, so be careful. They’re almost just as bad as Mr. Todd. They will eat your soul right out of your heart. And I don’t want that. I like my heart. I like my soul. God gave them to me. They are precious gifts and they belong to me and me alone.”  
“Well, uh…thanks little girl. I appreciate it.” 

She continued to pluck the flowers, the blood spreading to the grass and turning it to a shade of pink as Sonic and the others left westward, gazing at the yellow and tangerine sun that marked the sky.

The little girl smirked as she crunched another flower’s bones. As more paper cranes flew in the breezy sky, the soft bodies of the flowers drifting away, she brandished a small black pistol, and shot one of them with a discreet bang, the crane screaming as its bones were crushed by the earth as it fell. The girl took it, making sure it was dead, then she tore off its wings, blood spreading more to the earth, the rain of red shading more of the ground a reddish pink.

“Blood makes this world alive. It is my duty to make this world breathe,” she said.

 

—

The world was slowly turning a tint of blue as they walked. It was about the afternoon, and they slowly knew that night was coming, as the paper cranes took to rest on the rice paper trees and the big titted women talked about going to sleep before they would walk sluggishly with such tiny legs and such large breasts that made their vision small and distant. Big pointed out some of the things he saw in this world with a hint of wonder, but otherwise, he was quiet, as Sonic said to them that he was trying to be careful, to not make a sound, to make the beasts of the world not notice him and the sword he carried that was glistening red and was in the shape of hearts. It was a sword that maybe Knuckles would’ve laughed at, maybe called it a “girly” type of weapon, but it was a weapon nonetheless, given to him when he defeated Mr. Todd, and even if his shoulder ached and still bled a little through his bandage, he wielded it, and his grip was tight and nearly made out of stone, as his eye seemed to be made out of magnifying glass as he scanned the horizon. Everything seemed distant. Quiet. Even the cranes did not peep a sound.

There was nothing but grass and the trees and the streams and the sky, the many shades of colors about to blend. He heard nothing, and he felt nothing, and he saw nothing (that interested him, anyway, except some splatters of blood on the grass). Tails followed him at a close pace, the fox with the innocent blue eyes always gazing up to him, wondering what his new father was going to do, the blue hedgehog who promised that everything was going to be better, and that soon the torture and the voices and the screaming and the blood rivers and the candy cane striped terror would stop as if he could sniff the gingerbread that was baking in the oven with the hot chocolate and Christmas carols ringing outside. Oh how he wished it was Christmas already. How he missed that holiday. He hasn’t celebrated it in two years.

The streams were shards of blue and white, with origami trout swimming in them, shades of dark blue like smoky silhouettes made from cigarettes. There were origami flies that flew above them occasionally, tiny shades of black against all the color, but they were gulped as the trout would leap in the air, and down their gullets they would go, into their stomachs, to be digested. Sonic never saw his reflection, only the fish, as they would stare back at him with their glass green marble eyes, curious, as if they too had a working brain like his. Somewhat working, anyways.

As he took his eyes off the fish, it was suddenly that Sonic thought he saw a glimpse of a black shade, a little dark spectrum of color in his vision, the feeling of a heartbeat, the gazing into his own soul, much like the fish were doing when he looked in the stream, except with eyes that were weary and red and filled with disdain and loathing. As he walked further on into the world that looked like mosaic glass, more of the dark shade emerged in his vision, of carroted fingers and long tendrils of hair, oily and unkempt, with shredded robes that no longer covered the creature’s privates and buttocks. It was sudden that he was seeing more of what this creature was supposed to be for only seeing a piece of black fragment, but he was cautious. Steady. Didn’t want to do anything that would cause a fight with his sore shoulder that still bled through his bandages. His sword was ready to stab anything that was coming his way, and his grip was still stone cold, and his eyes were stone cut as well, as he looked onward. The sun was sinking forward, the shades of red becoming sharper and more finely tuned like HD colors in a plasma screen, singing a song with their hues of the night where a hedgehog died, where everyone died and the blood continued to soak the earth, and the earth could breathe, because it was happy, and it was well-fed, and it was quenched.

Tails shook. He didn’t like what he was seeing, and he was more afraid as the sun ran from the world. He thought if the world was darker, then more creatures, more monsters, would arise from the dirt and kill them on the very spot. He wished he was a good fighter he thought. He wished he had some kind of a weapon to protect himself, without him depending on both the purple cat and his now best friend, the blue hedgehog. If he had a gun, he would squeeze the trigger so tightly, while his brow would be drenched with sweat, and if any beast was going to come to make a meal out of him, he would make the bullet fly and he would be safe. Oh how he liked guns. His father told him what one was and why he should never touch it, just for his safety he would say, and that he never wanted to see him hurt or dead and he loved him, but if he had a gun, the killer who murdered his parents would be dead, and he would be in Hell, right where he belonged. And maybe he wouldn’t even be in this hospital. Maybe he would be home, safe, by his mother’s bosom, near the warm fire. 

Oh how he wished his mother wasn’t a candy cane anymore. How he wished his father had a head. How he wished he wasn’t a candlestick that started the flames to blaze through his mind.

If he had that gun, he would let it click, he would let it bang with a resonating boom, and he would see a small flicker of fire and the bullet would sear right through this thing’s head, as one of the creatures had appeared in Sonic’s vision, and with a scream, it slashed him with their carroted fingers, and it struck him, a deep gash of violet red on his chest, the blood seeping as he held it, his gloves once more stained with more of his life being poured out. Even if his gloves were now red instead of white, his shoes becoming black with more stains, he clenched his fist, and even if he was in so much pain, he swung his sword, the wound on his shoulder hurting and aching once again, and the monster’s with the gemmed eyes disappeared into the darkness of the earth, watching the blue hedgehog make his move again, to dare cut them and to kill them and deprive them of their valuable juices that they beheld.

“Sonic, are you alright?” Tails shrieked, holding onto him and examining the slash marks. “You’re bleeding badly! I don’t know what those were, but they really hurt you!”  
“Don’t worry about it Tails,” was all he could say in the middle of a battle that wasn’t won just yet. He held his wound again, trying to shove all the blood back inside his body, the small little streams being dammed up. “This is just yet another thing the nurses have to worry about when we go back to the hospital. They didn’t cut too deep. I’ll be fine, just keep yourself behind me and I’ll make mincemeat out of whatever the hell these things are.”  
Big, looking as if he was distracted by the creature’s silhouettes on the grass and the rest of the world, noticed Sonic’s injury. In all of his years in the hospital, he thought he forgot what blood looked like, as he lived in relative peace in the Chronics ward. With no worry of getting injured as he was finely tuned to the dark after living there for nearly ten years. But he remembered that blood was something that came out of his mother, when Zebediah, his long-forgotten father, would beat her black and blue. And he would cry for his mother to feel better, pray to the angels in the sky that soon her wounds would be sealed back up again, and sometimes she would see stitch marks on her head and around her eyes, thinking the angels were little surgeons and they fixed the gaping holes and they answered his prayers and his mother was alright again and ready to receive more beatings from Zebediah as if it was clockwork. Big has only seen a doctor about once or twice in his life, and he had completely forgotten all about them. He almost even forgot what the red rivers were exactly called.

But yet when he saw Sonic’s bloody scratches, he thought he wanted to cry again, as they reminded him of his mother. Oh pure Aure. Oh the poor lady who was now in a women’s jail, for murdering her husband they thought she loved, so long ago…

“Mr. Sonic, I hope the angels in the sky stitch that up! That’s what they did with my mama, the angels would sing and with their little sticks they would seal up her…”  
“Shut up Big!” he shouted. “Here they come again! You’re strong, how about you help me!”

The creatures screamed once more, their long black slender knives slashing at the air and wanting to slash at all of them and make them bleed, but in a quick flash of a second, as if Big could detect their movements in his fur or like he was psychic, he gripped one of the creature’s wrists, the long shadowed swords ready to stab towards his head. Big stared at the creature, the creature with the purple jewel eyes that told him of all the world’s woes and miseries, and he jerked his hand, pulling the wrist backwards, breaking the creature’s arm in one attempt, and it screamed again, its gem eyes trying to search within him, and in a quick flash of a second Sonic counteracted with a swipe of his sword, the creature’s side completely torn away like ripped paper. The sword had a black, filmy substance over it, the beast’s blood, and it held its wound much like Sonic had when he was clawed, and it crumbled to the grass, whining and moaning and crying, and it began to rock back and forth while crooning a song in its dark voice that Sonic thought he once heard as a lullaby, as ink was beginning to envelop the grass around them, as if the artist had made a mistake of spilling it all over its canvas, all over his Sonic fan art. The creature moaned, crooned, and cried to the sky, as Sonic struck it in the chest with his sword, the hearts glowing a piercing ruby red as it thrust through its body and into its inky black organs, and the creature stopped speaking and singing and sighing, and it was dead, as it sank to the earth, never to return.

The other creature saw the death of his friend, and now realizing that he was all alone, with no companions to help him kill the furry creatures that dared walked upon the land they thought they owned, it sulked away into the black shades of the land, melting into the darkness like a liquid mixture. It made one last scream as it escaped, as Sonic thought he could see the creature’s naked behind, moaning and crooning that dark song, all the way back to the edges of the world, and he could no longer see a sudden shade of black.

The hearts in his sword glistened, and when he lifted the sword from the creature’s inky black body, he felt it became heavier, but as he examined it he could feel more power emanating from it, as if the sword reached inside the creature’s heart and took its soul, and it made the sword stronger, more resilient in its battles. Maybe the sword got stronger every single creature’s soul he took, and the creature’s sighs and moans and wails would echo in the sword’s sharp slices.

Sonic’s shoulder was still sore, and his wounds still bled a little, but he thought he had to ignore it for now, the nurses would look at them later, and that he could hear faintly the sounds of the sea crashing against the cliffs, trying to devour the world, below the land, a flash of yellow lights as the sun continued to sink down the horizon. Night was coming, and they had to hurry now, unless they wanted to face more monsters much like those, those without a soul and those who were hungry and needed more flesh to feast upon.

“Nice job Big. You’ve successfully battled your very first monster here. How does it feel helping the big man out, huh?”

Big could catch a hint of a smile in his face. And he smiled too, although he was still concerned about the bleeding in his chest. He wished the angels would hurry up and clean his wounds and stitch them up with a very thin sewing needle, otherwise they would gape until Sonic ran out of blood in his body and he became as shriveled as an inflatable pool toy that was flattened and with no breath of air inside it. He nodded, looking away from the blood and the blackness from his sword, and they continued onward, Sonic limping and clutching his chest, to the sounds of the ocean breathing, to the gathering of mahogany smoke in the distance.

 

—

 

The moon was blocky and looked like squares and dabs of paint, as the entire world became a sudden rush of blue. Sonic could see the stars out in this night, the little dots of white paint that nearly poked through the sheet of canvas this world was, showing the world back inside their hospital. As he continued to rub his wounds, reminding himself of the pain he experienced in the battle (a weird obsession he had when he was either manic or really depressed was touching his scabs and wounds until they bled again) as he saw a simple house on the cliff near the ocean, with only a few black bushes that rustled in the night wind and with a torch light that only made a small portion of the house a glow of yellow and a scant of orange. Big and Tails were exhausted, but Sonic signaled that they were nearly to the end to their goal, and that they were meeting the man with no face very soon, and they would soon have a talk about how the world worked, and that something for Sonic, whatever it was that made him so hurt and made him battle such a strange creature to get there.

He could see the ocean as he gazed as they walked on the cliff and onto the porch of the house, how it was nearly as black as the creatures out in the night, with the moon’s blocky face shining on the surface. The cranes were sleeping, nestled in the rice paper trees, no squeaks and peeps and rustlings. Sonic could feel peace and stillness as he walked and knocked on the man with no face’s door, expecting to get an answer right away and an invitation to come inside with a very polite man who was so happy to see company at last. But as he gazed into the windows of the simple house that looked like a bear’s mouth with so many white and gray and black shards of teeth, he could see that the man with no face just gazed into the fire that he was burning in the mantelpiece, completely ignoring them. The three of them peeked inside, noticing how bare his walls were, without a dash of pink flowers and green stems overgrowing them, and there was simply nothing else in his home but a fire place and a window that looked gray, opaque, nearly like a mirror (that the man with no face couldn’t use anyways as he never knew what he looked like). He simply stared into the fire and said nothing, even when Sonic knocked louder, even when he began to ask, “Hey, can you hear me? Hello? Guy?”

“Why is he just staring into that fire?” Tails asked. “Does he know that we have an appointment with him and that he should open the door when someone knocks it?”  
“Why does he have no face? Why is he so strange? Why is everything so strange here?” Big knocked on the door as well, and while his knocks were brassy and loud and nearly shook the house, the man with no face still did not respond, and continued gazing into the fire’s red and orange eyes, unaware, uncaring. “Maybe he’s deaf. My mom told me about those kinds of people. They might as well have no ears she said.”

“Well, we’re not coming here for nothing. We’re coming here to talk to this guy and if I have to bust his door down, that’s just what I’m going to have to do. Stand aside, guys, I’m going to have to be responsible to paying for the damage in this house, if I even lived in this world at all.”

Sonic stood back, sighed, and tucked in his arm, elbow strutting forward, and using all the strength he could muster with his weak and damaged body, he charged against the door, banging it with loud clangs and loud shouts of “open up!”, but yet still not getting the man with no face’s attention. Even through his struggles of busting open the door, even when he thought he would break his shoulder (his bloodied shoulder, no less) as if the door itself was casted with iron, it wouldn’t budge, and the man with no face coughed, smoked a cigarette while he now stared outside the window, the silver stream of smoke puffed from the side of the house to the other side of the world, as smoke didn’t disappear in the air, it always gathered somewhere in Wonderland, until it could choke everyone with its very silver streaming hands.

Sonic hardly noticed that the man was at the side of the window when he continued to try to budge the door a crack. Either the door was rock solid, or the strength inside him was dissipating. But as he prepared to give it one more shove, he heard a shrill, smoke filled voice shout, “Hey, what the hell are you doing trying to break my door! Do you guys know that this is my house and I could report you for this? Hey, stop that now, you shit-filled rodent!”

The man with no face wasn’t a very kind man, Sonic realized. He was a man just like everyone else, full of wry hatred and bitterness.

He stopped, and while he felt as if he needed to correct him that he wasn’t a rodent at all and in fact didn’t even belong to that group of mammals, the man swiftly walked to the end of the room and opened the door, and asked, “What the hell do you guys want? I just want to spend a lone night by myself like I always do and you suddenly barge in here wanting to break down my door, as if you think the type of door I bought is cheap or somethin’. Just tell me what you want and get the hell out of here; I’m not in the mood for visitors.”

“Hey, we were supposed to come at your house and discuss with you about Wonderland, and they said you had something for me! I don’t know why you’re giving us such a sour welcome when we’re your expected guests!”  
“’They’? ‘They’ who? Who the hell ever said you could come here and I’d give you something? I know I’d like to give you a swift kick in the ass for trying to break my door!”

Sonic was tense, but he tried to remain calm. It wouldn’t do him any good if he got in a fight with someone who Shadow himself told him that he had to make friends with. Let bygones be bygones, no matter how much of an asshole this man with no face was. “Shadow said so. You know Shadow, right? He’s a friend of mine, and he told me I had to talk to you to know more about this place, and you were supposed to give me something that could help me. Because you know a lot about this place. Shadow told me you knew everything there was to know about Wonderland.”

Sonic noticed at the mention of Shadow the man with no face no longer had a rigid posture, as he relaxed himself, his voice softening and no longer with the stench and rasping of smoke. “Is that so? Shadow is a good friend of mine too. Yes, I do know a lot about this world, and I guess I can help you with that. Sorry about my ‘sour greeting’, but I guess this just took me by surprise. Come in; I don’t have any chairs, so I hope you don’t mind standing for this talk.”

The door that Sonic assumed was possibly made from concrete opened as the man with no face pushed it away with only one hand. The man with no face, Sonic found out, was also a very large, and a very strong man, as he nearly overshadowed them in the room, his overcoat looking like the night sky back in his world: empty, dark, and vast. It was getting cooler as the day ran into night, and they thought the fireplace inside his home was very welcomed on their shivering bodies.

The walls were bare, completely white, with no frames or pictures of any shades of color, and the floor was only creaky wood that became dirty and rotted over the years, with some bits of trash collected in a pile (mostly magazines that Sonic thought looked like Playboys. He was just like everyone else. Horny.), and there was no upper floor or bottom floor. Only a window in the side of his home, with some magazines that the blue hedgehog confirmed was Playboys and “men” magazines. And just like everyone else, if Sonic questioned him about it, he would say he just read it for the articles. That was all. That was it.

“I’m sorry my house is so boring, but it’s just how I live. I don’t really need anything else here. I’m perfectly happy just the way it is. I don’t need TV and shit. I just need a couple of mags, cigs, and the window to look at once in a while, and that’s honestly all I need. Anyways, since I know now that Shadow, a good friend of mine, has asked you a favor, I guess I can introduce myself a little bit. I won’t give you the details to my fucking life if that’s what you want to know, but I don’t want to tell you my life story, so you’re going to have to kiss my ass on that.

“I was given no name. I was given no face. I was only given this personality, this body, this world, and I have lived here many, many years ago. I honestly don’t know how long Wonderland has been around to be honest with ya, but if you don’t believe me, I have Playboys all the way back from 1972, so maybe this place was around since the ‘60s is my guess. Wonderland is ruled by a king you’ve most likely already heard about, named the King of Spades, and he’s been here since the ‘60s is another guess of mine. I’m not sure if there’s been another king before him; so again, kiss my ass if you want. While I’m certainly not a special character round these parts (which Sonic greatly disagreed with that as he continued to talk), I was given an ability that made me a bit…special, you could say. As you’ve noticed whatever the hell your name is you blue rodent, colors are very important. They give life to the world, and they tell you if something is bright and cheery, or if something is going to be dark and ominous. Colors let you see how the world really is, and if you had the ability to see what a man’s true intentions are by seeing the colors that shine inside of him, then you know exactly what your relationship with that man will take ya. Whether he wants to kill you or be friends with you or simply use you like a dishrag. Since you’re going to be around Wonderland for a while, I advise you to take this ability of mine and use it wisely, because this ability, whether you believe it or not, is not a toy, and should not be treated as such, and if you do, you’ll have to kiss my ass on that too. I will grant your mind to see colors of a man who either wants to murder you or be your friend, and to see the true colors of a situation. This will come useful as you traverse Wonderland, so you can shoot me for saying this again, but I must really emphasize it, use it wisely. Or I really will make you pay for what you did to my door.”

The man with no face touched him briefly with the weight of his heavy hand, Sonic flinching, but thinking on what exactly he talked about when he seemed to ramble about colors like the rest of this hospital, and he blinked, and instantly with the man’s touch, he saw an explosion of color, everything bursting with reds and yellows and blues, but mostly blues as he stared at Tails, then Big, then the man with no face. They all held a small glow of bluish-gold light, which Sonic thought signified that these people were his friends, and although the man with no face was at first aggressive, he was an ally as well, and he had no plans to hurt Sonic (except making him kiss his shadowy ass if he disobeyed him and did use this ability as a “toy”, but Sonic thought that this wouldn’t be an issue with him.) He saw the world outside and it shined in a brilliant shade of red even though it was clearly blue, showing him that this world was dangerous, and caution had to be taken when he walked around in the silver grassy fields and the quiet plains that were kissed by the moon.

“Now, a little bit about this world. I can’t give you all the information I have of this world as of yet, as it’s still a big mystery to me as well, but there are actually four different continents on Wonderland, and each of them are very different from each other. There won’t be any seafaring to get to these continents, however. You’re going to just simply have to ask Shadow on that when you feel like you should move on. And by just thinking about it, you can travel to that continent as often as you wish. This continent is called Murakami. The other three are called Picasso, Dali, and Gogh. The King of Spades kingdom is somewhere in Dali, which I’m sure you will visit soon. But for now I want you to do some errands for another good friend of mine, and keep him protected while you’re here, because Murakami has so many freakish beasts that they’re willing to crunch through your bones and give no mercy, whether you’re a man, woman, or child like that fox there. His name is Christopher, and he’s a child exactly like that fox, only about six years old, and I protect him, because it’s my job, and now, I want you to protect him as well. Tomorrow is my day off because I’m fucking exhausted, but if you help me with this, I’ll help you by giving you the mind map to Dali, and I’ll let Shadow give you permission to enter that land. Because I’m sure you’re here for one reason and one reason only: to kill the King of Spades. And he’s going to be tough, let me tell ya. It’s not going to be an easy battle. It’s going to be a battle where you’ll be broken and bruised and bleeding and there’s a pool of blood near you. Shadow has tried to face him a long time ago, a really long time ago, but he failed, and now I think he’s looking up to you you little blue dirty rodent, so you better do this job well or I’ll shove a stick up your ass and roast you on a fucking fire. Do you get that? I mean, you have to really be strong, really be brave, and really be willing to fight this battle, and if not, you might as well get the fuck out of my house now and get the hell out of this world, because you’re not worth my time. So can we agree on that? To protect Christopher for a while and I’ll give you the details to where the King of Spades lives? You better say yes, or get the fuck out of here.”

The man with no face’s voice was bitter, cold, and dry, but even if it chilled Sonic somewhat, he smiled, getting the message that he had to be a true hero among the hospital, to slay the King of Spades and to allow the children to be free and the patients to be free and to let this ghostly embodiment of a man to be free too. He nodded, and said yes.

“I’ll be around this place once in a while. Some patients see me, but they should pay no mind to me, because who the hell cares? I don’t care about them one bit, and if they think they need to talk to me they’re mistaken. You will be set on this mission tomorrow, so take the time in the hospital and take care of whatever you need to take care of before you come back. I cannot tell you exactly why I protect this boy named Christopher, but maybe you’ll find out soon enough when you meet him. I’ll let you leave this world now, and you can pick up the pieces later. I’m counting on you, and so is Shadow, and so are the patients in this ward. So you better not fuck this up,” he growled, his finger protruding to his chest like a knife. “I’m sorry I’m not the happiest goddamn man around here, but I try with what little I got of this world and what I face when I hear of the King of Spades. He is a shitty man, and he needs to be taken down. So fight the fight, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Sonic smiled again, a wide jutting smirk. He wasn’t sure exactly what was making him grin so big on such a serious situation as this, but he laughed, and said, “With how happy and positive you seem to be, I think I’ll give you a nice name. How about Smirk? For such a shining guy such as you.”

“Go fuck yourself you piece of shit,” he replied, before he swung his fist at him and suddenly everything became a blaring white.

He didn’t experience the pain of his punch. He was back at Wonderland, and Big and Tails were back in the Chronics ward. They were back in the ward that was as black as the ocean he just saw, and he was back in his homely Acutes ward, with the dark green wallpaper that made him want to puke.

“Sonic!” a nurse gleefully shouted. “Come on, it’s time for lunch! You don’t want your food to get cold, do ya?”

He was hungry he realized, and he would think about what he experienced later, as he walked out of his room and into the dayroom, seeing that the food was brown in his colorful vision, telling him it was going to taste like shit.


	15. Rouge's Story; The New Recruit

For as long as Rouge could remember, she lived in the streets. The concrete roads, the amber lights, the sirens wailing every half hour when she’s awake, hiding from the pigs in uniform who wished for her to go to a more concrete land with steel bars. She has been here, ever since she was born. She met a man who wore a feathered hat who always drove in a limousine for all of her life. She has been on the run, has been craving sex as if it was a child’s craving to chocolate, has been using heroin, all her life. She has been doing this for as long as she could remember, and she thought as she went back in her memories that the lifestyle was sort of fun, and it was sort of like Hell. She couldn’t tell which. It was the only thing she knew for so long, that was embedded in her mind, that when she was admitted into this hospital, a place that completely changed the rules on survival, she was confused, and all she could think was to remember of the rules she used to have, the rules that she loved and she thrived in.

Rouge was born to parents who had no names (as she couldn’t remember them now). Her father abandoned his wife and his child, and her mother was a prostitute who was selling her body to try to pay off her cocaine loans. Turns out Rouge was only an accident, as her father only paid her for sex and suddenly thought he loved her, and turned out she was pregnant. And she didn’t give a damn about her. And in a few years, Rouge was going to be just like her, just like mommy, just like the white powder that begged her to be alive and manic and have you afraid of the red and blue lights and the whine it made every few hours when she lived on these streets. “You might as well got aborted you piece of shit,” she said, “because you can never survive out here. Not with who you are. Not with you being useless like you are. Getting a job? Going to school? I don’t see any of that shit with you! Just be as useless as me dear, everything will be fine.”

Rouge had no home, except the streets of Dallas itself. Her mother was homeless, and her only enjoyment in life was sex and cocaine. She went to bed with a different man every night giving her money by the drawers just to get a temporary high, to walk on the fluff of the clouds in the sky with her small wings. She wasn’t sure why she even stuck around her when all she did was call her nasty names like “stupid ass cunt” and always said she always got everything wrong. Every detail, every movement, every thought, everything that Rouge was was wrong. And Rouge cried, and wished she was a better child to her mother. But her mother only spat on the ground, smoked her crack pipe, and went selling her body with her pimp. “Don’t cry for me when I’m gone, you maggot shit. Because mommy ain’t ever gonna protect ya and she ain’t ever gonna do shit for you. Because no one ever did a goddamn thing for me, especially your dead beat father who’s off in some nowhere land like all the men I ever met.”

It was when Rouge was about 12 years old that she decided to run away from her mother, to find her father, wherever he was in this heated tar-filled, loud, and stenched Dallas street. Rouge was only 12 dears, she couldn’t think to herself that her father was possibly somewhere far away, maybe somewhere like China where he thought it was the only country he was suited to living than the disgusting redneck Bible belt of America, but Rouge still set her sights to finding daddy, the one who must’ve truly cared. Maybe she would’ve even built a boat to reach China, if it was possible. But no matter how loud Rouge’s voice was to reach her father to tell her that she loved him, he didn’t care, and he was only deaf. He was too busy being a dentist who was paid just like everyone else. Communism. It was the only way you could ever live he would say.

As she traversed the golden glitter of the city streets, she searched for food, anything that didn’t had cigarette butts and condoms attached to it just like glitter in the roads, and as everything fell dead silent, she hummed a soft song that she thought she once heard her father sing as he left the house that they used to own that had two pit bulls in the backyard that might as well been lined not with a white painted fence but barbed wire, she sang, and she remembered of those times, when her mother was less cruel and her father was actually there. A better man.

The mountain tops glow  
With the sun’s light that falls like snow  
The fog surrounds us and it would tell  
Of a story of a man who fell  
His mind cracked, his eyes ached  
He realized that money was power and everything was at stake  
Everything was dark, everything was silent  
So he put a silver cock next to his head and caused a riot  
The sun couldn’t shine then, it was too vain  
Because the sun only shines for the well and sane

She never knew what the song meant, and she thought that a “silver cock” only meant a silver chicken. If they existed.

As she dug in the trash, a man with rotted teeth, with a feather in his red hat, with glasses that gleamed in the amber and gold, and she realized what exactly what her father meant by “silver cock” as it clicked against her head and she told her to get in the car bitch, or else I’ll blast your brains all over the wall, because I have a dick to be sucked.

She went inside his black limousine, that might as well have been lined with barbed wire even if it was so inviting with its neon lights as if she was a moth, and as he drove, she made a contract with him to be his prostitute, his little hooker preteen girl, as he unzipped his fly, and without much hesitation as the gun was pressed down onto the center of her head, she sucked a brown cock, and she was his little prisoner, and she was the city of Dallas’ prisoner, as she lived in the underbelly of the concrete jungle. And what was a little girl to do? Rouge thought. I had to go with him, further into the land of sex and honey. I had no choice. I couldn’t do anything else, unless I wanted a head full of lead. So they drove where the sun continued to roast the black road, and that was when Rouge became a prostitute, at age 12, trying to give money to her man who was now her boss.

Rouge looked at her arms, her blue, popping veins as she looked at her skin. At 14 she tried heroin. Anything to make the pain go away, she told herself. To make the rush in her head that made her feel like she was in heaven for once, not the dirty world that she knew was called her home. Once she put that needle in her arm, she felt a sudden rush of blood to her head, an immediate high on just preparing to insert the drug into her bloodstream. It was like a game to her each time she needed a hit. Try to find the vein, come on, come all, try to find the vein! You get a stuffed toy and a Led Zeppelin picture if you find the vein to put this needle in and give this woman a reason to forget all the pain she has witnessed since she lived on the streets so long ago! Come on you, the one with the pigtails, would you like to stick a needle in her arm? It’s only about 80 dollars! It’s only about 80 dollars for one hit! Come on, you would like to try, would ya? It’s fun!

Her body was withered, old, and decayed, like a rotting tree, and she was only in her early 30’s. That’s when it was the time of your life they said. Not when you had these memories banging the door of her mind. No, it wasn’t the time to have fun and smile and laugh. It was the time to remember, to pay for past sins, to think of ways she could redeem herself, but there was nothing she could do, as the past was set in stone, and she couldn’t change what happened. Not after the many men she fucked and wished she could find an emotional connection with, not after the man who raped her several times and beat her because she couldn’t meet the quota of the day, not after her mother was shot in the head after they tortured her with shoving things inside her and slapping and beating her in the head with a bat until her brain thought it was going to burst right when the metal met the head. She wished those things would be quiet, but there was nothing she could do, but yet she still craved sex, she still craved love and affection from all these men in this hospital after being denied so many times in her life, she wanted that last hit of heaven as she could imagine herself finding the thick blue roots that dug deep inside her dirt that was her arm and piercing them.

But a man she met who she thought was going to give her a large paycheck for just a blowjob was actually a cop undercover, a pig who wasn’t wearing his uniform, the blue and red lights dancing through the streets as he handcuffed her and took her inside his car. The people who lived on the streets for all their lives told you that at least once or twice, the police were going to find you, and you were probably going to make a little visit to the slammer, and it wasn’t so bad sometimes. Sometimes you actually had a bed and food to eat and if anyone bothered you they might put you in a secluded place where you could think to yourself for a while. While Rouge was too used to the allure of the streets, oh the golden glitter streaked tar that awaited her once she would be in that slammer for a month or so! As they rode through the city she could already tell that this pig in his uniform was different from the others. Unlike most pigs in uniforms, he actually cared about the bat, and he asked her a lot of questions that she thought it wasn’t his job to ask.

“Where did you get those cuts on your arms? There are quite a lot of them, and they’re all straight. What makes you get injured that much?”  
“None of your damn business. Keep driving and take me to the damn jail already,” she replied.  
He paused, as he gazed forward into the road. It was raining. It streaked across his window, made the drops shine with glittering greens and reds and yellows and golds, just like the road. Just like the road that Rouge belonged to.  
“And you look very skinny. Famished. I can see your ribs sticking through your skin. Do you eat enough everyday?”  
“None of your damn business, I said! Just take me to the jail and shut your trap!”  
Another pause. He pressed the button for the wind shield wipers to turn on, the raindrops becoming smeared and the window was now clear. Clean. Free of troubles by one click of a button.  
“And your eyes are red and I can see black rings around them and your voice sounds like…you’re dead. What happened to you? Can you tell me? Please?”  
“You pile of shit, just take me to the jail and shut up!”

He smirked. He expected that kind of response from someone as hurt as her, and he was all too used to it. He was in this job for about ten years. He reached for his cigarettes, even if smoking while he was driving with another criminal wasn’t allowed when they themselves needed that hit of relief from the tar and arsenic. He lit it up, an orange flicker of light, and he breathed out a line of gray smoke that unfurled around them, fogging the car.  
“That’s what you want, don’t you?”  
“Hm?” she sounded.

“You want me to take you to jail, where in a few months time, you’ll be released, and this process will repeat again. Where you’ll inject that drug into your skin again. Where you fuck yet another man senseless but he doesn’t give a damn about how sensuous your body must be under that white glow of the moon. The pain of dealing with all of this and a pimp who doesn’t care, so you take it out on yourself, because there’s honestly no one else to take it out on, no one to talk to, completely alone. Just the sleepless nights will be with you. Just the razorblade. And I just don’t think you need to be here or there, my darling. You need to be somewhere safe. To take a rest. To get back to a normal life.”

He was silent after he said his piece. The police car stopped on a red light, the ruby crystals on his car shining as boldly as the streets began to be paved with rain. He crushed his cigarette between his fingers, the orange light going out, the drugs, the sex, the pain, the sleepless nights, seeming to be crushed under them too. But she knew it wasn’t so. It wasn’t so.

They were both silent, only the sound of the rushing rain breathed between them.

She saw a white glowing sign as the rain continued to beat down the car and road; the road she was so familiar with and knew was only her friend that she would now miss, because the white bold sign said to her as they drove across it, “WONDERLAND STATE PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL ENTRANCE”.

So long drugs. So long sex. So long pain. So long sleepless nights.

She was too accustomed to it. She was too accustomed to it all, and she wanted it back. It was her mother for all her life. Her mother who simply didn’t give a shit if she died and only needed her fill of cocaine, her few minutes of heaven before they pounded her and shot her in the head.  
Her insulin needle contained no more of that brown substance. Only Thorazine and Ativan.

 

—

She only had one friend in that entire ward. Only one friend who would stand to listen to her. And for once, he didn’t want sex. He just wanted trust. And Crunch bars.

Rouge usually got candy from the security guards who felt sorry for her. It was a nice gesture, but she didn’t like candy all that much. She mostly got Crunch bars, and she hated them. But yet she thought it would be rude to simply throw them away when there was someone out there who probably needed them more than she did. Someone who she thought she could connect with simply for the allure of a little piece of chocolate.

The sunlight was hazy as she looked beyond the barbed wire windows. She thought it would be the perfect time to take a smoke on this particular day, like a cup of hot chocolate in winter. And that was how she felt with her heroin. Even if her veins tried to crawl out of her skin, it was her nice little cup of hot chocolate, a little thing to unwind the day with. But yet there was none, only detox, only sweats and rapid heartbeats and feeling like she was going to puke the best meal she ever got in years. And she hated it. The drug was her calling to home, her little reminder of what she used to be, and she thought she should be proud of surviving in those streets, to suck so many dicks to get where she was today. But she was trapped inside not the gold glittered streets, but the dark green splattered on white walls, and she often stared at them so often, to see if the two colors would blend together. But it never worked for her. The sunlight continued to shine over her, and the dark green never got lighter. And the tar and arsenic weren’t in her system. And not her brown liquid. Minutes of heaven. 

She saw a large, yellow polar bear, wearing a red cap and a green scarf (perfectly attired to how cold this hospital got to be), and he said nothing as he stared at her chocolate bars, but he took a seat by her, completely focused on reading what appeared to be The Great Gatsby.

“Hey. Hey, big guy.”  
He looked away from the book and to her.  
“Want some chocolate? I don’t like it that much. You can have it if you want it.”  
He was quiet, much like the police man in the car before he took her here. But he reached over for one of the bars, unwrapped it, and said, “Thank you.”

Silence, except the chewing of the bar and the crinkling of the wrapper. He was about halfway done with the book. He took up reading ever since he was admitted to this hospital. He thought reading was the biggest time taker of all, and he might as well learn something new while he stayed in the same place, his life void of experiences but staying in a world where colors spoke and a man drew strange beasts and lobotomized them when he found them to be useless for building his very own world. Reading made him forget completely about this place and all the troubles it lied. It was his own heroin, his own minutes of heaven.

Then the white bat smirked, a provocative smirk that she tried to allure the bear as much as the streets allured her, and she said, “Wanna fuck?”

He turned to her, his face flushed, almost completely pink. He wondered what would cause a woman who looked like she was 50 to say something like that to him. Did she really deserve to be in this hospital, on account of how crazy she was? They only met for a few seconds and she wanted sex? Was her diagnosis a nymphomaniac?

“No thank you,” he answered.  
“I’ll give you more of these Crunch bars if you want me to give you a blowjob.”  
Silence again.  
“No. I’m fine, thank you.”  
“Doggy style for about twenty of these?”  
“No.”  
“Anal for…”  
“Damn it, no! Stop asking me, you troll! I’m not going to have sex with you just for candy!”

He slammed his fist on the chair, and silence surrounded and blanketed them again. She expected him to slap her, punch her, punish her just for saying the wrong thing, for being herself, being Rouge, who was wrong ever since she was born.

But as she waited for a few moments, expecting the blow, he returned to his book, and there was nothing. He only read, and albeit he seemed irritated with her, there were no marks on her face, no cuts, no bruises, no threats. She was…safe.

And she thought, that maybe, just maybe, Rouge, the whore that was born as a mistake, born as a piece of shit that never was loved by both her parents, never was loved by the man that was her boss since she was 12, was never completely wrong in the first place. If she was right to him, despite her strange requests for sex, then maybe her mother was wrong. Her boss was wrong. Her father was wrong. Maybe in the end she was an alright person. Maybe even a good person. Maybe someone who could actually be someone someday. Someone who wasn’t a piece of shit. But that was a stretch. She had so many flaws she had to fill up before she could ever say that about herself.

The polar bear grunted, ignoring her. But yet he didn’t walk away. He continued to read, while Rouge shuffled her body to stand the cold that was coming from the vents above them, putting her long skinny, but scarred legs inside the hoodie she was wearing. She shivered as she tried to keep warm, but still she shook and rubbed her hands together. How cold does this place need to be anyway? she thought. Enough to freeze right at the very position they were in, so no one could act out or misbehave and everyone would be healthy and have a peace of mind because they could never move again, she assumed. She looked at the polar bear’s fur, thick and nearly gold in the bright hospital’s lights, something that could keep the bat warm even if she lived in the arctic, if she killed this bear and skinned him alive and used his organs for a nice Eskimo dinner and his fur as a coat. But of course she had no thought of doing such a thing. Maybe if he had her precious heroin and he ordered her to kill him because this patient could be suicidal for all she knew (after all, he was here), then she would, simply just to have that drug, that shit brown diamond she wanted streaming in her blue veins again.

She leaned over, laying her head on his body. And again he didn’t move. He continued to read. He took a glance at her, realizing that the crazy bat that asked to give him a blowjob was cold, and he said nothing.

She looked at the rest of the patients that were inside the hospital. A few men with snot dribbling in their nose as they caught the flu, complaining to one of the nurses if he could give him his cigarettes (something that Rouge also dearly missed), and a purple weasel listening to the radio, as a guitar wailing in the distance was echoed throughout the hallways, as a green duck watched television to hear an old man rant about Democrats and abortion and a pink hedgehog and a purple cat sitting on the green leather seats, one of them sliding her finger up and down continuously and one drawing and coloring a picture that was nothing but full of reds. It was probably a psychotic picture for all she knew. Everyone in this hospital was possibly insane. Even this polar bear who continued to be with her, even when she was clearly being crazier than him.

She decided to see if she could strike up another conversation with him, to see how truly insane he was.  
“My name is Rouge. What’s yours?”  
“Bark.”  
That was one strike. He had a very strange sounding name that didn’t seem like it would fit with a polar bear. Maybe his family had a history of mental illness.  
“What got you in here? Why are you here?”  
“Nothing. My girlfriend lied and said I was suicidal when I’m not. That’s all it is. I’m really not crazy, but nobody believes me.”  
Strike two. If he wasn’t crazy, he would’ve been out of here quickly. And no one believed him that he wasn’t insane. So maybe he really was.   
She gave him another Crunch bar.  
“Want to be friends and try to get through this dump together?”  
He stared at her, his glance still and unmoving. He moved his arm away from his book, and then slowly, he nodded. “Just don’t ask me to fuck you again and I think we can get along just fine.”  
Strike three. 

Call the police, there was a loony on the loose. And his name was Bark. And just the name itself would tell you how fucking crazy he was.

But even if he could’ve taken a knife and sliced her body completely into pieces, she fell asleep next to his body, the dark greens and white waning in her vision and becoming completely black, warm and comforted.

Even if he was crazy, she found someone. Someone who could deal with her.  
A friend.  
And Rouge thought she would never find a friend. No one who could see through her flaws, all her little holes inside her body, and say, “You’re alright.”  
She wished everyone else would be like that. Especially her mother. Especially her father, who thought that living in Communist China was a better place than her and this awful corporate America.

And she forgot about all those things, for an hour. And it was the most blissful hour she had. More blissful than taking that needle and injecting the brown shit in her veins.

This Bark guy was her new high. Her new solace. Her new peace from the streets, the jungle that begged her to come back, especially the man who was wondering where she went, the man who wanted her shriveled body to be sold for more sex, to end up in a fate just like her mother.

And she was safe. Just for a while. At least for a year or so, however long they wanted her. And she wished Bark wouldn’t leave either, even if he claimed he wasn’t crazy. He was her new drug. Her few minutes of heaven.

 

—

 

“Hold still, Sonic. Are you hurting yourself again? If you are, we need to report this to Dr. Robotnik that you’re still acting out on suicidal urges. I don’t know where you would get anything that would…”

She stopped, as he hissed in pain like an injured snake from her cleaning out his wounds on his chest. The scars still throbbed, but they were becoming scabbed, no longer bleeding the red river that streamed down him so long ago. It seemed that long since he met those naked creatures with the knifed fingers and the gemmed eyes that gleamed a sharp purple. He could still remember their gazes and the screams they made when he sliced apart their black splatter-like bodies with his sword, but he could never tell the nurse how nice it felt when he did so. For as all she knew, those monsters didn’t exist. They were back in the hospital of Wonderland State, where all those monsters were all inside your head, and the only way to get rid of them is to take that medicine, to take the pill that would solve everything, including the nightmares that roamed this world. And maybe, just maybe, Sonic would be back to normal again and his mother and father would love him for what he was. That was, until many electroshock therapies and lobotomies later. He would become a hedgehog who only spoke in one syllable words and have a giant bruise on his eye, as the doctor inserted that stake in his brain, his weak spot, as if he was some kind of vampire, one that feasted on misery and trauma. Yes, he was back in the hospital, and he was back being that vampire, where he could only tell the nurses that he somehow found something to harm himself with, and that was how he got these awful marks and scars. Including the one on his shoulder, so long ago.

The wounds turned from red to white, as they were now neatly bandaged. He no longer had the ugly marks and scars, whether they came from monsters that he knew existed in his head, or from himself. The nurse wrote it down on her chart, and called in another nurse that now Sonic was getting more clever hurting himself, and that he needed to be watched carefully while they reported this to Dr. Robotnik (or Eggman, Sonic grew to call him, because he had a body that was shaped just like an egg, wondering if he fell to the floor he would crack and his yellow blood would spill out). Sonic could never see what they wrote about or claimed what he had, because they always hid the clipboards so neatly under their arms, and they never let them go. They could be saying that Sonic was a nitwit and an asshole and any other insult he could think of for all he knew, they could be saying this and they would gossip about him, all with communicating with each other with their little clipboards, their little form of e-mail and text messaging. They would pass the clipboard to someone else, and everything they ever wrote about Sonic, would be right there. In Wonderland, cell phones didn’t exist. Simply clipboards and voices. Either from your head or from outside, and they were unusually loud. They begged to be that loud, otherwise if the hospital staff could have it completely their way, this hospital would be quiet, cold, only speaking in whirrs and clicks as the patients inside of it made it run, made it happy, made it such a peak of high-grade machinery. And all he could think of was the machine inside the Chronics ward, the machine that killed so many of the patients that became the Forgotten Children, burnt them to crisps, to ashes, and then everything fell down and crumbled and was no longer such a nice, smooth-running machine. Not any longer.

Then he remembered what they said to him. That he had to be kept under close observation, even put on one on one with someone. And he couldn’t possibly go to Wonderland and back, with someone on his back all the time! Were they doing this just to test him? They possibly knew that he knew something was going on inside the hospital’s inner workings, so they needed someone to spy on him, to make sure he would never go into this damned world of Wonderland any longer!

“One on one? What do you mean that I need to have one on one? Look, I won’t hurt myself ever again, I swear it to you, I’m sorry that my brain is so fucked up that I think about it, but…”  
“Sorry isn’t enough, Sonic,” she said, her mouth making her words snap like a crocodile. “We want you to be safe while you’re in this hospital. And hurting yourself isn’t the answer to your problems, and we want to teach you that, so you don’t do it ever again. This is why I’m sending someone to help you, someone who will watch over you. Is that clear, Sonic? We don’t want any more patients dying in this hospital. I think we’ve had enough of this hospital constantly being in the headlines for things like that.”  
“Maybe if you would actually believe that freak, Dr. Splinter, is killing everyone for his own gain, then that wouldn’t happen anymore, would it? You need to get rid of him! In any way you can! Fire him, literally put him on fire, stick a stake in his eye so he would get what he deserves, something! You know what he’s doing, right? How almost every patient here is dying with sudden heart failure or suffocation? You all know! All of you!”

Her words once again snapped his ears, clinging onto him. She wasn’t in the mood for Sonic’s “shenanigans” again today. “Sonic, Dr. Splinter is the one who made this hospital, and he tries very hard to help these patients. He made a lot of breakthroughs for various disorders that we treat here in Wonderland. And just so you know, state hospitals aren’t known to help every single patient out there. Some are just uncooperative with us and choose to die like this, or some become violent and need to be lobotomized to be treated…”  
“But don’t you see that those lobotomies don’t work? Don’t you see how everyone who comes out from them becomes a drooling Frankenstein? What don’t you understand on what works for people and what doesn’t? Certainly Dr. Splinter isn’t helping anything! I don’t care if he even cured my so-called bipolar disorder or autism or whatever, he can kiss my ass for thinking I need to be in here for a year!”

He could feel the fires in his mind burning inside him again. He gripped a chair with both of his hands, tightly, becoming red and white and strained, and he wanted to throw it at them, to get them to understand that he was in pain, that he needed someone to help him, not this Dr. Splinter, not this asshole who was taking apart people’s lives, dissecting them, making them broken and halved and them screaming for mercy until he sliced their brains with a stake. The doctor was performing a live vivisection, and he would scream and cry and tell him to get the fuck off his life, get the fuck off his body what is he doing inside him but he continued to toy with him, toy with his organs, toy with everything he ever was, until he would zip his body up with stitches and he would tell him that he wasn’t cured yet, so he had to perform another dissection and slice and chop more things in his life. And he wished it would all stop. Just make it all stop!

But the chair stood, and he kept it in his place. His eyes were beginning to be moist, telling himself that it was really sleep and tiredness that was making them wet, but it was really the swift change in mood. The sadness. The aching depression that sunk to his bones. It wanted to swallow him whole like a snake as the nurses decided to discuss who should doing the one on one with the hedgehog, as he dragged himself back to his room and he crashed into his bed with his disassembled sheets and he wanted to cry into them all night until the moon would see his suffering and glow on it with its silver hands and he would make his sadness known to thousands of people as they looked up the night sky every day, as his sadness was a star, and it was up there, shining so bright, so bright and blue and dingy and dark and full of blood and with the blast of this gun he will blow his fucking brains out and his life would be over in a flash, and no more bright shining star will he be. No more bright shining star that glowed to everyone on how much promise he had, until he exploded in a supernova, a black hole, and he would destroy everyone that once loved and respected him. Including his parents. Oh his parents. How he used to love them so.

And he could hear his father’s voice as he laid his head on the pillow, making it wet with his tears, as he said, “I wished you were a better son to me. I really wished you were. Then things would be different, my boy. Things would be different.”

And he fell asleep, as the moon later dissolved into the morning sky and the sun peeked overhead.

 

—-

 

He awoke, and he didn’t know what upset him anymore. It disappeared just like the stars and the moon. Someone was making him be on one on one, sure, but he thought of a plan as he shivered, Knuckles gone again at the first sign of morning, off to breakfast, as usual.

He could get this person to be in his army. If he couldn’t get them to believe him that Dr. Splinter was really an evil, conniving man who was sucking everyone’s energy to be used in his own world, then he would just have to prove it. Prove it to them, and soon they would believe.

But there was the question of how successful he was with Amy. Amy didn’t believe him that Dr. Splinter was in charge of a world beyond this hospital. And she was one of the saner ones. Or well, almost anyways. She didn’t want to be going outside on trips for anything for months. She thought inside the hospital was “comforting”. She was too afraid of the world. She was too afraid of the unexpected and surprises.

There was the mission of protecting the boy that Smirk guarded, named Christopher, that was set for today. He couldn’t imagine having the boy hurt because he wasn’t there or having Smirk pissed off and having his colors shine a bright violent red because he didn’t do what he promised to do. So he thought if he wanted these two people to be convinced of this place called Wonderland where there were naked monsters with slender machete fingers and paper cranes and boxed girls and boys and women with large breasts and a King of Spades, then he had to do it quick, before he couldn’t escape from the hospital. Although this world was dark and seeped of madness, and exhausting as he looked at his scars again, it was certainly much more exciting than the hospital itself. The hospital days dragged on, and there was often nothing to do but talk about your feelings or color a picture of a sad puppy dog, with crayons that were dull and short and couldn’t even make the picture vivid and alive. Like color was supposed to do.

“Sonic! It’s time to take your medicine! Come to the day room please.”

Of course. The medicine. They were still trying to get him addicted to drugs, drugs that held promise, but only lied in an empty life. He had to get past this too.  
He walked in the day room, seeing that all the patients were sitting at their tables, eating yet another mediocre breakfast. It was two waffles that were half-frozen with peaches and the same oatmeal that was partially digested by the trash when they threw it away. Of course. Always with the oatmeal. He wasn’t sure why they wanted them to eat it so much, but he knew they were trying to get them to take their medicine in it. That’s why the purple weasel was acting a little bit calmer than usual. Because he usually ate it, and always he said that he ate worse things in his life, but even if Sonic told his theory that it was recycled and drugged he would still eat it anyways. And that was why he was in Wonderland. Because he always avoided the truth.

The nurse held up the small paper cup, with a pink pill and an orange one. He knew that one was an antidepressant, while another was possibly a mood stabilizer. He didn’t even want to ask what the pills were for. He simply felt the rush in his head, the sweet taste of mania in his brain, as he grabbed the paper cup and threw it far across the room with strength he thought he never had, with a wide smirk on his face. He didn’t know why he did this, except simply the little demons in his head, the manic ones that made his brain into flames, they wanted him to cause mischief, cause havoc, and laugh about it while he did so. He could’ve refused the medicine in a more mature way, just simply said no, but he thought that wasn’t necessary. Just show them who was the one who got to control his life. And that was the demons. They chose everything.

“Sonic, what is going on with you? First you start hurting yourself, and now you’re openly defying the staff and the entire hospital? You can not take the medicine, but this is just going to keep you here even longer, not to mention we might as well lengthen the amount of months you get to go outside and see your family in visitation. Because we simply don’t think you’re…”

As he still continued to grin, watching as he was making such a show, such a spectacle of himself that everyone wanted to look see look see, it was suddenly that he saw a reddish brown palm raised in the air, as he heard a voice that sounded out beyond the sounds of the grunting and eating and the silence of the other nurses. “That won’t be necessary, Ms. Hedgeapple. Sonic’s simply just having a hard time right now, adjusting to the hospital and having everyone force him pills when he doesn’t know exactly what they’ll do. Don’t try to shove them down his throat. Just let him know that he’ll be okay here, and nothing bad could happen.”

He saw the woman near the medicine tray, who observed the entire incident but didn’t even raise a single finger to the blue hedgehog. She was a red panda that looked to be about in her 20’s (possibly a student nurse), with a round palette of white blond hair on her forehead and wearing spectacles that shined in the hospital’s lights that nearly cut in Sonic’s vision. While the other nurses would curse under their breath if they didn’t had to put on plastic masks and be nice and cheery all the time from Sonic’s behavior, this woman was calm, as she carried the clipboard that had Sonic’s name in giant bold letters with a picture of his grinning face (as he thought at the time being in a mental hospital was going to be such a good idea), she even smiled at Sonic, who was no longer smiling that Black Dahlia smile, and she thrust her hand towards him, and some of that calmness seemed to rub onto him as the demons no longer made him want to destroy himself anymore, and he shook it.

“My name is Ambra. I’ll be your one-on-one person today, and I’ll try to make this as less painful as possible, as I know you probably never wanted to be on one-on-one in the first place. If he doesn’t want to take his medicine, that’s fine, I’ll just try to convince him another time. Just eat your breakfast and we’ll talk over your plans and what you want to discuss with the others in group today. Don’t worry about me staring at you, I promise I won’t do that.”

He was surprised that even when she heard that he already attempted suicide in the hospital, already was shot with Thorazine, and was already claimed to be hurting himself when he was only inside the hospital for a few days, she was still calm, and she still gave him a soft smile. He guessed that she knew she had to stay calm for a patient who was so close to being put into the Chronics ward already with his acts, even if it’s only been about a few weeks. She had to stay calm to the beast who had sharp fangs that could kill her and himself and everyone else in the hospital. She couldn’t make one wrong step, or the monster was going to attack again, and he thought maybe he wouldn’t survive this time. He would be dead, before Dr. Splinter could use him completely.

The waffles tasted stale as he shoved them in his mouth, but he was so hungry that he didn’t care about the taste, but only to get something inside his stomach, so he would be prepared to face the next challenge that lied ahead of him. Ambra continued to smile, a soft smile, a kind smile, one that didn’t ooze of evil or hate or insanity. While constantly smiling was something that made Sonic wary, paranoid that they were going to hurt him, he felt safe with her. It simply exuded warmth, happy that she was here with him, and he could feel her kindness. He thought he could feel it as she lightly touched him on the shoulder. He flinched, the pain in his shoulder still stinging, but he had another one of those crazy thoughts inside his head emerging as she examined all of his wounds, cautiously, but yet with genuine concern: that she was a healer. That she healed the lepers of Jerusalem before, and that she came to heal him, to make him better, to make him complete and whole with his tattered scars and his missing pieces. 

She looked at him, her blue eyes gazing into his, as she asked, “You did this to yourself? For some reason…I don’t think you really did. These don’t feel like anything you could get from cutting yourself with something you could get anywhere in this hospital. And I doubt you have long nails under your gloves to do the job either.”

She was one of the smarter nurses too. Smart, pretty, and kind. Although he disliked most of the staff, he actually was starting to like this Ambra already. That warmth was spreading to him too, because he could feel himself being kind towards her, giving her a chance to crawl inside his mind.

“You won’t believe me if I told you where I got the cuts at. Do you promise not to label me as insane or send me to the SR room if I say how I got these scars?”  
“Send you to the SR room? Sonic, I’ve dealt with a lot of cases such as these. Trust me, nothing is going to shock me if you told me where you got the scars at, and if you want, I won’t tell the rest of the staff what you said either if it has to come to that. It can be a secret between you and me. Because I worked in a lot of mental hospitals, and…it’s the worst hospital I ever head of. It’s just simply a crime that it still exists. This one just needs to be burned down. Burned down to the ground.”

The last comment she made really took him by surprise, as he nearly choked on the oatmeal he was even daring to eat (he blamed it on the journey he had to make and his empty stomach).

“You mean…you’re a nurse who works here,” he said between mouthfuls of food, making his speech sound slurred and garbled, “and you think that this hospital is a terrible place? What got you into thinking this way? I mean, you’re working here. You can’t say whatever you want about this place. The other staff would notice and fire you.”  
“You don’t realize this yet Sonic, but I swear to you, I am someone sent here to try to help you. I’ve researched this hospital a long time ago, as I want to be just as great as Dr. Splinter used to be back in the day, but I’ve noticed the statistics in this place that the other staff seem to ignore. Only 10% of the patients in this hospital leave, and only 1% of them are considered treated. 90% are stuck here, for years, or they suddenly die, most commonly of suicide, sudden heart failure, and suffocation. In case you haven’t realized it yet too Sonic, this place is a death trap, and I really want to help everyone get the hell out before all of you are dead. If I can’t even be as great as a doctor as Dr. Splinter was, then I’m going to at least save people’s lives.

“And Sonic, I want to help you too. There are cases like yours. Extreme bipolar with a case of confusion and feeling lost and alone. Well, I’ll try to make that go away. I’ll really try. Although I only have about 4 years of nursing under my belt, they considered me like a magician with my way of medicine and injuries. Unlike the rest of the staff here, I’m here to help you, not harm you. Open up to me about a lot of things Sonic, and I really will try to help. Trust me. You need to.”

He thought it was about time to use his new ability he gained from Smirk. After all, why open up to someone who would possibly betray him and send information back to the rest of the ward, back to Dr. Splinter? He thought, and sat still, the food still in his mouth, half-masticated, when the world shone in a glaring spectrum of colors. The hospitals were no longer the hideous shade of dark green, but black. Most of the staff were gold, which was something he assumed meant that they were good, but completely oblivious to the rule the King of Spades had over this kingdom, while the patients were shining a light of blue, and an inner ring of gold inside. And so was Ambra. He remembered this mixture of colors when he was with the man with no face. It meant that these people really were his friends, and they really would try to help him and that they meant no harm. Ambra’s eyes became a bright shade of green, a change from the almost violet blue eyes she had, until he knew that he got his answer, and the world resorted to its original colors, and she still sat, holding his shoulder.

His shoulder. He saw no longer any dark shade of red under the pile of bandages, and it no longer stung and was sore every time he moved it like a broken hinge. He would’ve unwrapped the bandages to see if she healed the injury completely, but the staff would wonder why he was refusing treatment from them, so he let them remain.

Was this animal a prayer from God? A distant savior who heard Sonic’s plea and wished to help? Where did she come from, especially in an ordinary place such as Austin Texas, and not somewhere where angels were often at, either in heaven, or dare he say it, maybe in Los Angeles, where all the pretty people lived.

“I know where you got these injuries at Sonic. I know about this place you have to keep a secret from the others. I’ve read theories. I know a little about this Dr. Splinter fellow, and even if he used to be a nice guy, he isn’t anymore, and now we need to make sure he doesn’t harm another patient again. Especially you, Sonic. You’re the key to stop Wonderland. You’re the key to kill the King of Spades. We need you. And I’ve heard about your next mission too, about protecting the little boy. I’ll be there with you, and you can bring Knuckles and Big along (poor guy was in a hospital for nearly a decade? I can’t imagine his suffering!), and we’ll keep him safe, because I heard the King of Spades heard about you, and he’s going to make all the monsters make sure you screw up. But trust me, with me around, it isn’t going to happen. No one in this Rebel Army is going to be brought down.”

How did she know everything about Wonderland? Was she really just God incarnated to stop this place? He thought. Sonic knew he had to count his blessings, however few there were, because this was one of those moments where he was bailed out, and he thought maybe he could really see the light in Wonderland being brought down to its knees, that it could really happen, and it was going to be something the entire world would know about, a place as evil as Auschwitz, and right when Wonderland would be decayed away, he would shout so loud that the world would shout with him. The loudest scream heard in the world was going to come from him, especially if the manic demons inside his head were going to say he was going to shout. The manic demons knew everything, and they made him feel inflated, have confidence, and made him into a person that shined of gold.

“Welcome aboard to the Rebel Army, Ambra,” he said as he slid his seat and stood up, taking a curt bow, still with small bits of food inside his mouth. “I don’t know where the hell you came from or what’s even your story, but…I can tell you can help us a great deal, with your special powers. I don’t even think you came from Austin. Austin is a place for boring and crazy whack jobs like me. You probably came from Hollywood, because you seem to be like some sort of celebrity.”  
“Celebrity? No, I’m certainly not, Sonic. But I’m glad to be in your army and I’ll try to treat your bipolar while we’re here. But you really have to trust me; otherwise this treatment isn’t going to work. You have to have trust in the other person that they can fix you; otherwise, you might as well not get treated at all. Sometimes that’s all psychiatry is is just trust.”

Trust. Something that he never felt in all of his life.  
Something that no one ever put onto him either, until now, since he was admitted into this hospital.

Manic episodes tend to have the person have an inflated ego, high amounts of energy, little need for sleep and sometimes food, and constantly “feeling good”, but can also bring bouts of anger, sleepless nights, and psychotic symptoms and delusions.

None of that was going to happen. Because he was a king that was higher than the King of Spades. He could touch the stars in the galaxy, he could kiss them even on their shredded skins, and he could bring down a whole world, a whole kingdom that this king built for many years, and he would crush him under his foot, because he was giant, much bigger than this pipsqueak, and this world would tremble before him.

He was Sonic. And the manic demons were saying that he was the greatest and most powerful person alive.

And he laughed and smirked and the nurses wondered if they needed to try to get him on the mood stabilizers again. Or the Thorazine. He was the Cheshire Cat, who had no reason to smile except for the constant madness in his life. Sonic was simply the embodiment of madness, and he would continue to bring chaos to everyone’s lives until he destroyed his own.


	16. The Drummer Boy Beats to the Squeal of the Pigs

The hospital walls were stricken with the light of the afternoon sun, the dark green and white appearing pale and no longer sickly. But the rest of the ward were sick, sick of the darkness that they always had to adjust their eyes as the light was pale itself and too sickly to appear to them. The sun only shined for the well and sane, and they knew that, they knew that they weren’t good enough for the sun, and soon they would only be good for the darkness, the darkness and toils of their minds as they were tossed carelessly into insanity by the doctors. The light beckoned them to come and stay, soak up the sun’s rays, but they were afraid to do so, because their doctors said also that the sun was bad for their skin. The sun was bad for everything. Earth’s brother wouldn’t approve of seeing your face in his rays, and so they hid, underneath the dark green and white, and so they would be beckoned to stay, until the hospital would soon be burned by none other than a new renegade in the Rebel Army, named Ambra.

She told Sonic ever since she was a young girl, she wanted to be a nurse. A nurse that would be able to provide comfort for all of her patients, to tell them that soon their departure wasn’t in vain, because they were loved by someone, and it was her, their sweet princess wrapped in white clothing, with the red mark above her breasts, which meant that she was more of a human than anyone else in this world. As soon as she grew up she realized that she wanted to be a doctor just like Dr. Splinter, a doctor who always traveled to foreign countries such as Africa to cure the sick and impoverished who couldn’t get that help any other way. For a while, Dr. Splinter was exactly that: a doctor who wouldn’t cure someone just for their money, but wanted to cure someone because they were someone, a person whose life they wanted to grow thicker, their flames on the candle tips bursting with life, and he could say, “I helped that life. I saved him.” And be proud for one moment that he wasn’t a piece of shit like he was today.

He was a ruiner now. Someone who carved everyone’s body with arsenic and cyanide and watched them decay slowly before his eyes, the acid rotting out everything in their bodies and mind. He was going to do it to everyone who came in the hospital, and he could even do it to the staff if he wanted to. Ambra told Sonic that he once held off the worker’s pay for weeks before they threatened to address him to all kinds of authorities, even the FBI, and he soon gave them all their pay and a raise, so they would be quiet and sew their mouths shut and never say another word to anyone on the people who were suffering inside, because they had money now, what would be so important to them now that they were paid to dig through the patient’s shit and piss? Money made the world go round, and without it, it completely stopped. So Dr. Splinter continued to pay his workers with as much he could, because he didn’t want anyone to know about the secret operations it lied. He wanted it all to be kept a long time secret to the world, and Ambra wasn’t sure exactly what secret was so important to this mad doctor that he wanted to kill so many patients, kill all the life that used to be in them, and she was sure that Sonic would soon be next, because the doctors were acting strange around him, telling him that soon, he would be taken to ward three, the Disturbed Ward, and he would never get out again. Just be around the loud patients and stain his padded walls and floor with piss and hear the cries of “Look see look see little hedgehog! Look see! I used to been a man, and now I’m nothing but a little insect, says the cries of the Lord! Look see!”

“I work a little at the Disturbed Ward Sonic. It’s constantly loud, it smells awful, and it’s not properly air conditioned so even in the winter it can be really hot for some reason…sometimes I hear really strange noises, like little weird…murmurs…and it’s coming from a patient that constantly tells us to ‘feed him’ but I think he could be in the Chronics Ward, because it’s coming from the wall…it always sounds like an old man, with a gummed mouth, wanting his dinner of apple sauce and pudding. We do have patients like that around here, but not in the Disturbed Ward. Those types of patients tend to behave.”

Sonic’s mind felt little sparks, little jolts of electricity inside, that made him think so vividly and using his imagination more than usual. It was the mania, it was the bipolar, it was the constant traveling between Hell and back with his highs and lows. Seeing the world in black and white. And today, everything was white, and everything was beautiful.  
“Then maybe it is the wall, Ambra. Because I don’t hear that coming from the Chronics ward. Not at all. There’s only about two patients I know of in there, and that’s Big and Miles. They’ve been in there for years with no light and no contact from anyone other than Dr. Splinter, and…it’s just awful, Ambra. You would definitely get angry for how inhumane that can be, but there’s nothing we can do to Splinter in this world. It’s the other world we can only attack him in. Shadow said he was invulnerable in the real world, with all these staff people and hiding in his damn office all the time…”

“I heard theories about this place Sonic. That there’s another world inside of here, that there’s a Rebel Army inside the hospital and they want to bring down a man called the King of Spades. Maybe you could tell me all about that? Trust me, I’m not going to send you into ward three if you tell me everything. I need to know.”  
The stories of the second world only fed her interest even more, the ravenous snake it was. “Is there really another world outside of this hospital? I know that I can’t trust anything in here, especially because of how many people leave and die...But it sounds like maybe Dr. Splinter has other operations going on in here. That he’s actually doing something illegal and something that could throw his ass in the slammer, but I trust you that we can’t seem to do anything to him in here…”

Sonic then explained of the world inside the hospital, everything he experienced and everything that Shadow told him. The Forgotten Children, the vivid dreams he had, the machines that ran inside the hospital and ployed tubes and wires inside of it to feed on the memories and thoughts of the disturbed patients, who would soon die inside the machine that Tails fed every two hours, and The End, the place where madness truly ran in a black stream, more black than the ones he saw in the Murakami world when it was dark and the stars tried to poke through the onyx hide. The stars were only small-sized knives however, and they couldn’t cut through gems even if they tried. Sonic wondered if he was like a star all his life, always blazing, always tried cutting through these pools of gems, but he was too small, too short, too much like a nub, and he would never have his fantasy of living a normal, ordinary life as an athlete.  
Ambra nodded, and listened intently. And Sonic thought she wouldn’t, but yes, she believed in every word. She believed that there was a fantasy world created by thought criminals, and she wanted the Forgotten Children to be safe and sound, to have their bell jars rest somewhere inside the family’s home, and then taken to a river that wasn’t made of gems, and they could finally be loved for the first time they were ever placed in this world.

“It really sounds unbelievable, but…we really need to stop this man. We need to bring back justice to this hospital, or even burn it if we have to. This hospital used to been a really prestigious hospital back in the day Sonic, and now most of the patients die and never get out and all the doctors still hold on to that promise that the patients will be cured because Dr. Splinter used to have a really great past…now he just draws monsters and draws places to make in this dream world of his, and he’s profiting off every patient’s death and I just can’t stand that he used to be a man I looked up to and wanted to be like, and now he’s nothing more but a piece of shit! A dog turd lying in the sun, baking, and I could smell it for miles!” She banged on Sonic’s bed, making a soft sound that the rest of the staff couldn’t hear. She told Sonic that if he got frustrated, he should punch pillows like the rest of the world. No one got hurt, and you got your frustration out in a safe way. And that was one of the reasons they had padded rooms. But Sonic knew he couldn’t punch anything if he was tied down and restrained like he usually was with both the white jacket and the Thorazine.

“They abuse that medicine a lot here. They think it’s a good way to get the patients to calm down when Ativan will do just fine…Thorazine is a bit too much and should only be used in severe cases.”  
“Well, that was a severe case, Ambra. Because I don’t remember why I did it now, but I actually broke some glass and slit my wrists with a piece of glass I found in the room. All I could think of was how nice my blood looked like when it streamed down…which I know isn’t the right thing to be thinkin’. I went with this craziness for many years Ambra, and no doctors could ever try to tame this wild beast. The bipolar, whatever they call it. I call it a pain in the ass if you want to be really honest.”

She held his hand, seeing the bandaged and still red wrists. There was some blood caked on the wound, a dried and red powder with stitches that seeped inside the body, to keep the arteries aligned. She moved her hands over it, the blood being drained back into the body, the color rushing back into his pale blue body, the stitches that were no longer required and fell from his body, their teeth no longer ingrained in the flesh. She did this with his other arm too, and they were no longer sore and the pain no longer thumped when his heart beat. His entire body was healed now, and Ambra’s blue eyes gazed back curiously into his, and he could only look away, as if he was ashamed, as if he didn’t deserve to be healed. He knew what he did was very wrong, and he felt no worse than what he did when he was a child so long ago, wanting to be hit by the semi’s off the Houston highway.

Ambra seemed to notice this, as her crystal blue eyes seemed to notice everything, and she held his gloved hands softly.

“Sonic…I can tell you have great pain inside of you. But that’s the issue: I can’t heal wounds that hurt your soul. Only physical wounds. But I understand that those wounds hurt much more than your wrists, and I’m wondering why you would want to hurt yourself so much. Even some people with bipolar resist the urge to harm because they see themselves as worth it, worth the pain, worth the darkness, worth the trip to Hell, but obviously you don’t seem to think so. You seem to think you deserve all this hurt, but I really don’t think you do. You deserve much more than this Sonic, you deserve more than a suicide attempt and saying that no one cares about you when I know people do. I’m sure your mother and father seem to care…”

He let out a low snicker, the madness of mania grabbing him by the reins. “They don’t, Ambra. They never did. They simply raised me because they wanted to be a soldier of God. A disciple of Jesus. Sending out the dough to all of the charities that don’t even give 1 percent to all the suffering and sick, you know, people who need it. And you know what I said? No. I wasn’t going to be like one of those soldiers. Because there is no God out there, Ambra, else He would’ve let me out of here a while ago and I never would even have to deal with this. Else I wouldn’t even have this disorder. Do you think God is kind, God is grand? Because I certainly don’t. The big man gave me too many ills to work with, too many pills you’d be prescribing me before I’m back to normal. What is normal anyways Ambra? Certainly not me.”

Not bad.  
He certainly was.  
His mother questioned it every day.  
His father simply thinks he’s not good enough.

And he began to walk around her, in a very tight-knitted circle by his sewing feet, his small toes and feet working, holding the needles and the threads, and if he continued he was going to tie up Ambra, making her tighter and tighter and tighter until she would suddenly not breathe and lie on the floor unconscious and Sonic would make her deal with his suffering…  
After a few moments, his walking continued at a speedy pace, until she made him stop, and she made him go back on the bed, and he decided to comply, his sewing feet completely ruining their opportunity to shine. No needles and thread boys, looks like we can’t put our skills to work on choking this bitch!

“Look, you definitely have parents who may not support you completely, but they must care about you if they kept you in here, even if they don’t know this is a bad place! If they didn’t care, they would get a court order issued to get you out, that was, if you didn’t attempt suicide or did any other questionable behavior. Now just sit, relax, and think about things a bit and how we’re going to help this Christopher child.”

He sighed. He twitched. His eye twitched too. His mind continued to spin, but he thought he couldn’t let his feet move or anything move in his body but his mouth as he sighed, as he laid back on the bed, staring at the puke green walls that he detested, and so much wanted to destroy and rip and tear until the colors turned back to white, and said, “I don’t know Ambra…the only way we’ll find out is if we go there ourselves. Shadow told me once I get Knuckles back in here we just need to think about the Chronics ward and we’ll be there. And we’ll pick up Tails and Big. I would leave Tails behind but…I feel sorry for the little guy. His parents died and he probably goes insane from being lonely, but I’m sure if we had someone defending him from the monsters that lie there then he’ll probably be okay. I think Big has to be the shield for him while we focus on Christopher. I guess we’ll have to be defending two children today, and that’s not going to be easy.”  
“Well, we’ll have to do it Sonic. The afternoon sun is starting to sink, do you see?” And she pointed towards the window, where Sonic could see the sharp glow of the sun radiating so low before them.

And it was. Sonic’s fur was beginning to glow a vivid shade of green from the tangerine face, the sun seeming to stick out its scarlet red tongue as the day was soon turning into night, and it peeked, until the clouds covered it and made it sleep. For a little bit. He knew he would be back, but only for a couple more hours.

“You’re right. No use in stalling here anymore. Get Knuckles Ambra, and tell him you want to talk to him about therapy or something like that, and bring him in here and I’ll show you how bad this world can get. Especially the Chronics. The poor Chronics. Poor Big. Poor Tails. They’ve been fucked ever since they were deemed Chronics.”

A few moments later, she brought Knuckles in as planned, and they both thought together on the Chronic ward, how black it was, how it reminded them of the soon coming night, and they thought about the color of this blackness until they were brought to the world of the Chronic’s ward, as dark and lurid it was until the shade of the colors from a rainbow crawling through the machine’s wires, the glare echoing throughout the halls, only brightening them for a short while. They saw Tails, with eyes that seeped of tired, perfecting the machine even more, making it even better, an even better crunching and grinding machine (the baby grew teeth! Dr. Splinter would say) where it cooed and it gurgled and it made another satisfied noise, and Tails moved away from it, wrench in hand, feeling like he really needed to sleep after being awoken from his two hour slumber. Again.

“Hey Tails buddy, I’m sorry we came here at a…bad time,” Sonic said, as Tails lurched towards him, wrench still in hand, the tool that he could plainly see could be used as a weapon against him shaking furiously, his eyes pumping tears, until he began to shout and scream, and Sonic could tell the mania was getting to him again. The mania creature. It always got in and sunk nails into your brain until it was deeply rooted in it.  
“No, it’s fine…You don’t see any other patients around here, do ya? Cause I got to fry them in this machine, and it’ll be great! There will be a lot of black cured meat that’s impossible to eat and screams and hands that want me to grab them back as I put them in to be cooked and baked, oh what fun is it to bake my patients to death, isn’t it? Such a glorious…”

“Tails…Please stop this…” Ambra was shocked at such madness that was coming from the hospital that she could plainly see by its commercials that claimed to cure their patients (making one Wonderland for another patient at a time! It cheerily stated on its blue screen that might as well have been dark green), one that was as young as 8 was spouting such diseased words like a run of the mill lunatic who had schizophrenia so deeply ingrained in his brain, just like a weed that would never go away, unless it was sprayed by medicine. Medicine that even Tails thought would never work. And Tails never got any of that treatment when he was admitted here. He was simply given scorn and the black abyss of the ward began to cover him, as the cicadas began to shed from their shells on the walls and they screamed as they heard the fox yelling, trying to mimic his madness. Cicadas were good screamers. They had a lot to scream about, being an insect.

“Just make him take two Ativan and he’ll calm down, Ambra,” Sonic whispered, as she complied, giving him the two red pills in the palm of his hand. “Tails…suffered from a lot, so he’s going to need a lot of help to get around to our level of sanity, which may not be much, but…”

As soon as she gave them to Sonic, the same action happened as the last time: Sonic picked up his legs, tackled the fox with his hands, and shoved the two red pills down his throat. The fox protested, gurgling out bubbles that appeared so clear and black in the spectrumed light, screaming, “No medicine! No medicine! Medicine make brain go bad! Medicine make brain go poof!”

Sonic restrained him, and after struggling and thinking the fox was going to choke, he forced him to swallow the pills, and while he tied his hands behind his back, Tails in what seemed to be in as quick as five minutes calmed down, and for a while, he forgot about the patients that died in the machine. He forgot about them screaming for him to help them, to stop what he was doing, and the faces of absolute shock and absolute fear that sucked the very life out of them. He wished he could forget their faces forever, their pleas for him to let them go and let them escape the hospital, but he said he couldn’t do it, Dr. Splinter would give him more shock therapy, he would even desecrate the grave of his parents when Dr. Splinter said so, on the fear of the shock therapy that would kill his brain as young as 8, and he stuck them in, and he could hear their final cry of terror.

Hitler never cared about the victims he put inside the ovens. They were Jewish pigs, why should he care about them? He thought.

But Tails did regret. He knew these people, before they were admitted in the hospital, had lives and families and children and jobs and dreams and aspirations, and he made that all burn away, shifted away into dust, and it was all because of him. He killed them. He murdered them in cold blood. And he would leave the machine after these two hours and wash away the evidence. He couldn’t count how many patients he killed. He was guessing about two hundred. Maybe some came from other hospitals. He wasn’t sure. Two years was a long time, and he killed two hundred people in that time.

He had a lot of pain.

Something that even the mastery of Sonic’s sewing feet couldn’t stitch up.

As soon as Tails calmed down, Big wheeled him with a chair, the fox drooling and being much like the vegetable patients, and they saw the cicada’s white shells glowing in the dark as they buzzed and clicked against their feet. They could hear the Forgotten Children, some screaming, some wondering if they could tear the cicada’s wings off, some trying to catch them as many as they could in a jar, and after they watched the children for a few moments, they went inside Wonderland, the gargoyle being silent. He didn’t had much to say. Except that Ambra looked like a fine cut of meat and Splinter was going to enjoy them once they died. 

The world blew up in pink. There were still the spectrums of blue and the spectrums of green on the flowers and the streams as the paper fish continued to scuttle up to the surface, the blue breaking up into light greens and light blues and whites, and the paper cranes still hung in the air, their hooked necks looking at them as they chirped and glided in the air gracefully. He could see the stars beginning to shine in the night, the paper stars that had a light inside them like a Chinese lantern, and they could hear the Man with No Face playing with the boy Christopher outside of the sun’s area, Smirk shouting and trying to catch up with the young boy who was surpassed him in speed. He coughed, his lungs full of black smoke, and he cried, “Fuck you, kid! You know that I’m a smoker! Wait for me to catch up for once, okay you little shit?”

The boy snorted and giggled.

Sonic saw that the both of them were playing on a beautiful night at the corner of his eye, the last of the sun flickering out like a flame, and even if Smirk was being his usual venomous language spouting self, he seemed to be enjoying his time with the child, not doing something that Sonic would know that most kids don’t do (Look up the half naked ladies in a Maxim magazine…Sonic winced at the thought), and for once, he was actually quite proud of Smirk. Smirk was being like a real father figure to the boy, and even Big and Tails who last saw him were impressed at his sudden transformation.

He noticed them before they could stand and watch them play some more. The Man with No Face snarled, the little boy hiding behind his great big overcoat, and he spat out, “The hell are you doing interrupting a fine time with my kid? You’re late, as usual, and I don’t fucking mean fashionably either.”

He coughed, and even if the child told him to quit smoking, he brandished another cigarette and lit it up, glowing a bright orange glint as he savored the taste of nicotine and blew out the raspy, gray smoke.

“You should’ve came here earlier. It’s almost 7 for chrissakes. 8 is Christopher’s bed time, and I assure you that Christopher’s fucking bed time is a fucking time I need to make good for this kid, or else he’ll beg me for water and check under the bed and shit. But I’m going for a little vacation, a place that’s much better than this pile of shit. You better keep Christopher safe or else I’ll tan your ass raw and hard, you got that? I hope we’re in merry fucking agreement with each other.”  
“You cuss…right in front of your child? You do know that children shouldn’t be around a bad influence like you, right? You look much too…much too…”

Ambra couldn’t find the right words to describe him. He was simply a man with no face, a man with no discernible features other than his long brown overcoat and his hat that hide it and a grin that sometimes sparkled in the light, but otherwise, the man was completely forgettable. Ambra didn’t know such people have existed in this strange world, a world where there were flowers that bled when they were plucked, big breasted women that had breasts so large that they could barely walk, and paper cranes that chirped and hunted for early worms. It was hard believing a hospital had this land exist for what seemed to be generations, but Smirk simply coughed and wheezed and gagged, and he said, “Much ado about matters, my good ma’am. This child knows that he should never do those things. I taught him well, honestly, and trust me, he doesn’t have a single scar or bruise. Even if I smoke, I don’t tell Chris to smoke, and I tell him it’s a nasty habit and it will make your face black like mine. And Chris said he didn’t want that. Now how about you introduce yourself, kid? Come on, they’re going to protect you while I’m gone for the evening. And I hope they take you to bed at a proper time, because kids who stay up all night are sore losers, aren’t they Chris?”

Ambra was suddenly surprised at the change of tone. A complete transformation from the crude, rude man they all knew him as.

He gave out a raspy sort of laugh, his throat full of tar, as the child continued to hide behind him, and he said, “Christopher, why don’t you introduce yourself to your new guardians? I have to go out on a bit of a mission, a little trip, and hopefully these guys will bring you back home safely and put you into bed at the proper time. And they better tuck you in good, or else there’s going to be hell to pay, won’t there be, Chris?”

The child placed his hands on his cheeks, trying to roll up the dough of silly putty on it, kneading it as he thought of the situation over. “You mean they might not take me back safely? But what about the monsters, Smirk? What about the nightlurkers? What about the tea…”

Sonic wasn’t sure why he was mentioning “tea” when describing monsters of all things. But Smirk hushed him, and said, “Hey, I gave these guys my trust, and you’re going to have to trust them too. Remember, if I trust someone, that means they will bring you home safely. Hate to make them babysitters with another kid they have to take care of…but don’t mention that thing. Don’t mention it to them and they won’t want to protect you anymore. Don’t scare them off.”

And the child moved his hands to his mouth, sealing his silly putty lips.

“I’ll be back, you sacks of pigshit. When I get back, I expect Christopher is safe, you got that? Or else there really will be hell to pay Sonic, and you’re already paying enough Hell as it is.”

His ghostly hand reached out, grabbing a bag that he carried around his back, seeming to be light from all of his strength. Or that he was carrying a bag full of paper. That was a possibility too.

“You’ll see me soon enough. And heed my words when I say you’re nothing. Nothing that can stop the King of Spades’ bullshit. But I would like to see you try at least. Maybe you have a fucking shot, but who knows? That’s completely out of the damn ballpark.

He walked away from them, bag in tow, his body seeming to wobble as he soon disappeared into the darkness of night, never to be seen in the land of Murakami ever again.

The boy with the silly puttry face looked up at all of them, their faces trying to be as kind as possible after Smirk’s constant rain of negativity, and the child wanted to hide, as these were strangers to him, and strangers were scary and they were big and mean and had knives as sharp as a dinosaur’s tooth and they wanted to kill him and hurt him and why couldn’t he come back with Smirk and live with him in their house and have bed time like they usually did and why did he had to go on a business trip he called it why oh why did he leave? But when he began to shake like silly putty tended to when you kneaded it in your hands, Sonic pat his head, smiled, and told him things were going to be fine, and that he didn’t have to worry about monsters.

“Who…were you again?” Christopher asked him.  
“I’m Sonic. And trust me, you aren’t going to be hurt. We’re much better than that. With our strength, we’re stronger than Smirk. I’m sure we can bring you safely home and read a story to you or even two if you want.” 

Sonic hasn’t felt this sane in a long time. But when he was with children, he knew he had to act sane, otherwise who else in this damn world would he be accepted by? Definitely not by teens like him. Certainly not adults like his parents. If he was accepted by his new friends and children, maybe that would be enough to make him happy. Maybe, if the lows wouldn’t stop scratching their nails on his mind’s door, ready to be devoured.

And they left, the child holding onto Sonic’s hand, Ambra watching them as they went, Tails behind Big, Big questioning everything, and Knuckles seemingly tired, but was itching for a fight, as he thought his blood was beginning to boil about the staff again. Even when they weren’t there, there seemed to be little ghosts that would remind them of his wife and child, and how long he has been away from them, and it made him angry, ready to leap at the nearest creature that wished to stab them with their pin needle fingers.

\---

 

All was silent, all was bright as the moon shone brightly against their fur and skin, shards of white on their faces. They were beginning to be a part of the world, part of the Order of Colors, and that their fur and fingers and feet would become scales and shine as the moon’s face wanted them to shine, and smile as Sonic could hear no sounds in the underbrush, just a silent night, sweet holy night, take the child to his bedstead and make him sleep a dreamless sleep.

The monsters didn’t seem to want to come out, even when the moon was shining so brightly. Sonic could see in the distance a paper coyote howled, but he was too far away from it, as it stared at the distance, and continued to cry under the moon’s sweet body. It was cold, and the child shivered as Sonic held him close, feeling his fur that was shining silver like this moon, and he said, “Monsters come at this time of night. I hope you’re strong. Because I certainly am not.”

“Ssh!” Sonic hushed, as he listened closely.  
The group stopped, Big looking across the horizon. He was well attuned to the darkness, and he thought he could see stick thin figures hiding themselves in the darkness, blending in, looking like simple caricatures of a child’s school drawings.

“I see something.”  
“What Big? What do you see?” Ambra asked.  
“Stick men.”  
Sonic and Knuckles both couldn’t doubt it. If they saw creatures as strange as the last ones, then they were sure there were even stranger ones out here.

He could hear the stream noisily bubbling as he attuned his ears again. The fish were feeding. There were loads of paper flies waiting to be swallowed.

“I feel funny,” Chris said.

He realized he was scratching the side of his cheek for a while, appearing a little bloody underneath the scratches. It was probably paper mosquitoes. They were out at this time in the summer, usually.

Knuckles swatted away at the flies, believing he could feel something glass hitting the side of his palm. He didn’t record on how unusual it felt to be hitting a little glint of glass in the air, so he never minded it. He didn’t want to think that the flies were monsters too.

His silly putty face continued to become redder. Scratch scratch scratch. More blood was beginning to be dug out.  
Tails noticed how strange it was when he swat the air, however, hitting the pane of glass, and with a swift movement that he thought wasn’t possible until he could feel the smash of it against his skin, he clutched one of the mosquitoes in the palm of his hand and it was crushed as he tightened his fist.  
His palm was bleeding a little.  
He unveiled it, seeing what seemed to be a regular mosquito, but its nozzle was completely different, the straw to suck their blood out. It was a syringe that was nearly larger than itself, and it seemed to be full of blood before he crushed the bug. The creature stared at it with its dead, rubied eyes and Tails told the others, told the others it was time to run in the moonlit night.

“These mosquitoes…they’re not regular mosquitoes. They’re…monsters. They have…syringes…”  
“What’s a syringe?” Chris asked, in a plaintive tone. He was beginning to become scared, his cheeks becoming the very color of the plastic containers silly putty were put in, and he hid behind Sonic, tightening his grip on his hand, rapidly flapping his other hand to make the syringed mosquitoes go away. Fear was tightening its grip on him too, like a python, and Sonic knew now that it was time to run, and that time was now.

“Let’s get out of here!”

The coyote howled into the deep darkness, and the stick thin figures were awakened by the hedgehog and the crew and child beginning to dash hellforth. The stick figures had eyes like a praying mantis, with scythes that looked like one too, and they were beginning to slice the air around them, to chop off the hedgehog’s head, to make him and the little boy cry, to make them not know of what lied, what lurked in the darkness that was exactly the shape of a spade, and Sonic sliced them with his sword, their paper-thin appearances being cut and diced and mashed and slit and minced, and the creatures whimpered like a dog when it had no food or water and it was suffering in the street of a broken bone. The mantis creatures wanted their bones to munch on, for their skinny bodies that needed so much expanding, and they continued to leap in and attack, stabbing the night air as it screamed in its blades.

The child cried and screamed as well, and the coyote howled.

The creatures mandibles were salivating, and they were hungry for marrow.

And as far as his eye could see, these creatures were becoming more numerous by the seconds, more mantis creatures that desired to suck the life from their bodies. Sonic could only sigh, and he told everyone to get into fighting positions, because this was a fight they couldn’t run away from. Big had to protect Tails, Sonic had to protect the child, and Ambra had to protect everyone and even herself, as she thought these mantises look familiar as she saw their stick bodies in the glowing chill of the moon.

Sticks and stones can rattle my bones…  
But words can only scar me until I was beaten, bruised, and dead.

With their six legs they continued to murder the air, until Knuckles leapt and his fist hit one of their faces, dissolving into a liquid mess that was similar to battery acid. There was no harm done to him, and he jumped and hit, jumped and hit, hit them with their punches until his fists would turn red, as he reminisced about the day his wife and child were taken away from him when he was in the hospital, and he was met with the dark green loneliness, and he pleaded them to bring them back but they wouldn’t and they could only smirk and smile and laugh and calloued and callayed.

Big’s thick arms was cut, but the cuts seemed to be so small on his massive body. But he felt the sensation of pain for the first time in a long time, and while he felt like crying, he also felt angered, and the devil roared inside of him, and while Tails hid behind, he began to smack them with the palm of his hand and crush their heads until the battle was a massive river of batine. 

And he remembered his father’s bile. What was the measurement to contain his father’s bile? Gallons. Gallons and gallons of his vomit, as he continued to drink the piss warm beer under the smoking hot Texas sun, and he screamed for his son to get here, because he was going to beat him as red hot as the sun that was out that day.  
And he looked at the moon, and he thought he could see salvation, a guardian that kept him away from his father’s voice.  
I’ma beat ya! I’ma beat ya ya cowardly shit! I’ma beat ya!  
And he thought he was seeing things, but he thought the moon suddenly turned into Aure, his sweet mother, his sweet mother would be damn right proud of him for protecting a helpless child against the massive horde of insect freaks.  
And she said, “Go on, Big. Go on.”  
And he did. He would beat those sons of bitches and protect Tails and protect himself from Zebediah whenever he fucking could.

Ambra kept hearing the voices in her head, the voices that constantly told her that she couldn’t do a fucking thing to help these patients, because she was a patient herself, and she would never solve any of their problems because she never solved any of her own. And they laughed at her, they suddenly told her to kill herself, and that they didn’t need any of those redneck Midwesterns around here. Especially not in Texas, when it had enough rednecks.  
Her hands switched to the gun she didn’t even think she never had in her pockets, and she fired at all of these beasts, but she continued to hear the voices, and she wanted to cry and sob, and she howled in the night, along with the coyote, and she continued to fire, to blast their heads, even if their stickness stuck to the body of night.

The child cried too, and Sonic couldn’t stand anyone crying around him. He wanted to kiss him on the forehead, tell him everything would be fine, but he had to prove that to him first.  
The red orbs inside of his sword illuminated like the moon, and as he thought he would also howl into the night, he flickered a wave of red against the mantises, the creatures pinned against the invisible walls of the world, dissolving more into the liquid goo, and he couldn’t help but think of his father, and Tails also thought of his father, and they were very different fathers, with very different personalities and thoughts, and Tails missed his father, while Sonic believed he hated his and he hated him too.  
“I’ll never be like you,” he couldn’t help but utter under his breath.

I’ll never be like you…

The syringed mosquitoes began to lap up the mess of the mantises, sucking up all their goodies. Lap up, lap it up some more, because there was some more comin’.

And that was why he would never be like him.

Because his organizations kept lapping up, and giving nothing of it in their part of the deal. They were exactly like the filthy mosquitoes, just sucking up the dead and the poverty and the hypocrisy and the godlessness even though they claimed they believed in one. 

I’ll never be like you…

One mantis creature cut through the night and the stars and the galaxies and made a thick slit in Sonic’s cheek, blood running down his body, the drips and droplets beginning to turn the blue ground into a darkish red. And he knew this was something he wanted all along, when he ran that blade down his body, when he wanted all that emptiness and sadness and anger and pain and dismal darkness out of his goddamn body, and he screamed, and he cut the mantis beast in half shards as he screamed…

I’ll never be like you!

And soon, the ground was a shade of green, with the acid around them, with their blood running across their bodies and into their hearts as it pitter-pattered, and they were free of the beasts. Free of the pain. For now. For now, their faces stung with cuts, their bodies drenched in insect blood, but they were alive, and they were all part of the war, the revolution they wanted to take to better themselves, only for them and for their own goddamn good and no one else’s.

The cold and ice of the moon remained, and the coyote stopped howling. He walked away from it, and hoped to never see it again.

Christopher saw Sonic’s face, his side of his muzzle drenched with blood. His fur was no longer soft and comforting to the child, but sticky and he could hear a heart that was trying to kill itself with the beats inside of it. But still his eyes glimmered with warmth, and he leaned over and gave the little boy a kiss.

And his silly putty face became the brightest shade of red by being stained with the life blood of Sonic’s.

And they walked, hand in hand, to Smirk’s home.

 

—

Smirk’s home was yet again vacant, the only sound uttered inside was the crackling of the fire that Ambra started to combat the cold wind that escaped inside the windows. Sonic saw the upstairs, the shadowy remnants of his home revealing to be a dingy bathroom with a toilet that only worked when they pushed the lever twice. It was also mostly covered by the cobwebs of the spiders that constantly fell inside the tub (Christopher seemed to not be scared of them, only calling them “little longlegs” and making them drown in the tub that only had lukewarm water.). Sonic saw near the sink there was only a comb, but there were no mirrors placed inside the home. He guessed that even Smirk couldn’t stand to see his own face, wherever it was inside of him.

Sonic turned on the faucet as the child splashed inside the tub, cleaning himself of the wounds. He knew the nurses would simply wash and disinfect it later on when they came back to the ward, but he felt that he had to make himself clean for Christopher. He slid the comb through his quills, a little ruffled since the battle, but they were just as dingy as the bathroom, from the lack of sleep and the lack of food inside him. These things caught up to him eventually. Especially with a manic episode that seemed to last as long as this one.

The blood was washed away, but he still had a clear red scar on where he was cut. It was just inches below his eye, and he thought he was lucky, as without his eyes, he was even blinder.

“What story are you going to read me, Sonic?” Christopher asked.  
Silence. He was picking at his scar, dried out already by time.  
“What kind of stories does ol’ Smirk have in here?”  
“Well, last night he told me The Princess and the Pea. But maybe you could tell me The Ugly Duckling.”  
Simple stories he had for him. Of course. Smirk was a simple man. Living in a not so simple land.  
“Sure, I can read that to you. Let me get you a towel so you can get dried up.”  
Sonic didn’t know how many spider corpses were lying at the drain as all the water dried out, their bodies limp and flat and cold.  
Sonic wrapped the boy up in a towel, his face nearly hidden. The towels had to be large. Smirk was a large man. And he lived in a small land.

As they went inside the boy’s room, the only clean place inside the dusty home, all his toys and books neatly arranged, but it was too simple, and Sonic knew that Smirk was too unimaginative to think of anything nice for the boy to live in. Anything that wasn’t just a boring dark room or a room with piles of shit everywhere.  
Christopher was tucked in, but immediately when the blankets came in contact with his body he wrapped them everywhere on his body, only a slit of his face from the darkness visible. Even inside all that warmth he shook from his cold bath.

Downstairs he heard Big shout, “Do you want any tea, Mr. Blue Hedgehog?”

Sonic realized he was cold too, and he would like a warm mug of tea to warm his insides. But Christopher continued to dig deeper in his blankets, suddenly afraid as the stove was turned on, the bright blue flames flickering on possibly the only elaborate thing in Smirk’s home: a blue teapot made of china with intricate designs of dragons on them. They looked as if they came from China itself, and Big would’ve thought how Smirk got a teapot like this in the first place, but he was too simple-minded to think of these things, and he sat and opened the fridge, to find only a few sodas and sub sandwiches and yogurts, which Big didn’t know that both were expired and rotten, as if they’ve been in this fridge for months. But Big was again a simple minded person who never saw mold before, and even if he thought how strange it was that the yogurt looked like cottage cheese and was clumped together and the meat had fuzzy blue spores, he took a bite, and his taste buds felt no difference.

The tea began to sizzle a little.

Sonic opened the book as Christopher still shuddered from the window’s whispers, and he began to read.  
“’The Ugly Duckling was a very ugly duck who was neither a mutant or someone who was stupid. He was actually a person before, like you and me.’”

Tails rocked back and forth in a chair by the fire, remembering his parents. Oh his parents. How he wished somehow they would come alive from the flames. Flames. Murder. Holocaust. Hitler. He was Hitler. He was making a Holocaust in the hospital, baking everyone simply because Dr. Splinter said so. And he shuddered too and thought about retching on the floor as he remembered their melting faces.

And so did Big.  
“I think I’m going to be sick…”

Knuckles looked outside, vigilant and cautious. He could still see the darklits of the mantis creatures, waiting outside, yowling, wanting to slice them and the glass in the windows.

Ambra simply readied her pistol, hearing to the tune of the voices again. They wanted her to march. March now damn it! You’re a soldier now! March to the beat of the war drum and march with the rest of the pigs!

The tea began to boil.

“’He used to be a man who was a beautiful shining child, until one day, God decided to fuck him up. And right when he got a little older, his mind got a little strange. And then he noticed slowly over time, he was beginning to grow feathers and a beak and webbed feet. Then he turned into a duck. The only sound he can make is a quack as everyone can’t hear how much pain he was in, his desperate cries for help as his mind was slowly dripping away to insanity…’”

Tails wanted to scream. He wanted to scream and cry and shake and vomit and kill himself, simultaneously. But he didn’t know how to do it simultaneously. He couldn’t figure out how. And his hands shook vigorously and he wished so much he wasn’t here anymore, but even if their mission was finished, they weren’t done. They would never be done for all he knew. Tears fell from his eyes, down to his fists. He wanted out of here, and quick, but he couldn’t stand to talk to anyone but Sonic, who was upstairs, paying attention to another child. Damn him. He was supposed to take care of him, he was his new guardian, not this child that only entered the fray for a few hours!

Big’s face became green, and his cheeks puffed, and he tried to keep all the bile in, his aching stomach that couldn’t contain it any longer, the filth and the mold. He tried to keep it all together. He remembered his father once got so fed up with him on throwing up from eating too much, that his father smacked him, threw him down on the floor, and rubbed his nose with the acidic pink puke, and he told him to eat it.  
“Ya better fuckin’ eat it ya pile of dead skin from a fucking rattlesnake, otherwise I’ma gonna kill ya, and your mother won’t ever hear from you again. Fuckin’ eat it now, the chili and the sundaes, fuckin’ eat it.”  
He remembered he took one lick off the bile and he wanted to puke even more.  
He didn’t want that to happen again. He would just swallow it and only get a few remnants of the rotten taste.

He promised his child so much. He promised his wife too. And they were suddenly taken away from him. All he wanted to do was get better. And he was being punished. Punished for simply existing. And he wanted to choke that Dr. Splinter, he wanted to make him suck his own dick, because he couldn’t stand being away from his family. The family he loved so much.  
Unlike his mother. God bless her soul and her brain.

Step right up  
March  
Push  
Crawl right up on your knees  
Please  
Greed  
Feed (No time to hesitate)  
I want a little bit  
I want a piece of it  
I think he’s losing it  
I want to watch it come down  
Don’t like the look of it  
Don’t like the taste of it  
Don’t like the smell of it  
I want to watch it come down…

The pigs were squealing, pushing and shoving and biting and punching and screaming and devouring, they were coming down in her head, ready for the slaughter, ready for the butcher. They wanted to be the most noble pig they could be, their flesh tasting of sweet honeymead, and they wanted the gods to know that they were a very desirable pig, and they wanted God himself to taste and pick at their bones.  
And she was one of them.  
She was marching to the tune. She imagined the millions of pigs ahead of her, and she wanted to shoot all of them out of her way, so she could be eaten by God’s gracious lips.

The tea screamed.

All the pigs are all lined up  
I give you all that you want  
Take the skin and peel it back  
Now doesn’t that make you feel better?

The tea cracked, revealing a small sliver of light, and a red liquid began to drain out of it.

“Big? What the hell is going on?” Sonic yelled.

The child cried.

Big threw up.

Tails’ fingers latched onto the handles of the rocking chair and he pulled them up and he tore off the handles and he screamed.

Knuckles screamed too, and he smashed the window, his fist completely red with blood.

Ambra screamed as well, and said, “Get out of my way you filthy pigs!” And she fired the gun, which the bullet flew and lodged itself in the wall, the sound of it being fired ambivalent in the room.

The teapot cracked again, like the ugly duckling wanted to hatch from its bloody egg, and it soon shattered on the stove, the red liquid flying everywhere, staining Big’s fur, along with the acid of his vomit.

And he saw a blue eye frying on the stove, staring at him, blinking, moving around in small directions, and Big thought he wanted to scream too.

Shove it up inside  
Surprise!  
Lies  
Stains like the blood on your teeth  
Bite  
Chew  
Suck (away the tender parts)  
I want to break it up  
I want to smash it up  
I want to fuck it up  
I want to watch it come down  
Maybe afraid of it  
Let’s discredit it  
Let’s pick away at it  
I want to watch it come down

The eye became rich in red veins, as if it was wasted away from years of no sleep. And all of them could hear laughter echoing in their minds, their hearts, and all over Murakami, as it said:

“Think you can defeat the King of Spades? Think you’re so fucking tough? You aren’t anything in this world! You are nothing but the saddest fucking bunch of deaf-mutes I’ve ever seen, and if you think you can stop me, I will carve a spade in your heart and chest and I will let everyone in the hospital know of your death and I will wear the skin of Sonic proudly every fucking day! March away assholes! March until you are blinded by the light! Bite me why don’tcha? But my hand will only recover, and this time, it will have a knife to chop away your head!”

Now doesn’t that make you feel better?  
The pigs have won tonight  
Now they can all sleep soundly  
And everything is all right…

And they were back in their rooms, Ambra back in her car, Big and Tails back in the Chronic Ward, and they all fell into a deep sleep as the sky’s eye rolled away and became completely white. The world was dead.


	17. Letters Between Sonic and Josephine #3

The dawn glowed, showering the hospital with more light, the red and tangerine and yellow intertwining themselves with their long spindly legs like a young couple who just discovered that they were both the soul mates they’ve been asking for in so long in their sad miserable lives that only love could cure. Sonic stretched his long spindly arms, his long spindly legs, and his long spindly mind as he thought over the things that happened last night, and the things he could probably do today, to further revolutionize the revolt against the King of Spades, the man who wished to wear his long spindly skin proudly and boast to the entire hospital that he was the king of this mighty jungle, and he was going to make the peasants in the world suffer from his kingly wrath, his long spindly wrath that coiled like a rattlesnake, ready to unleash its venom upon anyone who dared to enter this hospital.

He could hear the rattlesnake rattling its tail, the shaker that once calmed the babies to sleep, now had fangs and scales and venom, and it echoed inside his mind, the snake’s piercing eyes that glowed with gold and seeped with evil, and Sonic realized that something terrible has happened, something that he wished wouldn’t happen in so long that he immediately wanted the rattlesnake to insert its fangs in him much later than now, with the venom in his system delayed, but now he might as well not see the beauty in the dawn’s morning light. He might as well not see the beauty in anything, even in the hospital’s long sheet of bluebells and daffodils outside in the yard with the trees that guarded the windows with their long spindly hands.

His lows were coming, coming to get him, on a black horse known as the Black Beauty, ready to turn the morning into night, a night as dark and as opaque as The End, with no serrated stars ready to pierce through the blanket of God’s blindness. He always called his lows that. The Black Beauties. Because although they were menacing and powerful in how much his body nearly shut down on the might of the horse’s black diamond hooves, sometimes there was quiet contemplation in his depression, and sometimes, he saw the hidden brilliance in things, the gold in what he thought was only pyrite, and sometimes it showed him even in sadness, things were not as black as they seemed, but the Black Beauty, she was a harsh mistress, and she continued to ride in the dark midnight of his mind, and he made him cower in fear and cringe and grovel like a worm, suffering from guilt, anxiety, thinking over things that he really was responsible for his parent’s misfortune, not their over religious zeal, and sometimes Black Beauty would make him think of things that he would believe was an absolute sin in thinking, as his father and mother would tell him over and over and even slap him in telling him that it was wrong to think of that way, and that was what made him fear the Black Beauty than everything the Black Beauty could do to him, and that was suicide.

The Black Beauty made him a fancy preoccupation with death, made him interested in where the spirits went long after they died. Certainly not in heaven or hell. But in a land where all the spirits mingled, a world that he saw that he believed only existed in television, the life when you were a ghost and you could haunt people and try to solve the things you didn’t solve when you were alive. He wished that existed, but even the Black Beauty made him believe nothing was real. After one fair look at the Black Beauty she made you into a cynic, a nihilist that only thought corporations and scams and lies and deviltry existed, but nothing that made you believe the world was pure and right. The Black Beauty wanted him to hate everything, and hate himself, and ultimately plan out his own destruction.

But he was inside a mental hospital, where he couldn’t possibly plan out his death, as he already had a fancy flight of suicide, and he slashed his wrists with the piece of glass and made his blood spread in thick rivers. The Black Beauty commanded him to do that, and he could never really ignore the Black Beauty, the hooves it ran on the cold dark cobbled street were sometimes on fire, and its teeth would glare out to him even in the fog while its bloody red saucer eyes that were as clear as lights in a car would beckon to him, would beckon him to ride it until it had to face the The End, the blackest of dark, the darkest of blacks, and he could rest there in peace, forever in the abyss that was calm, warm, and quiet, away from the chaos and insanity that his mind spoke, and he wished it could be true of now. If only the hospital was The End, if only it was warm and safe and he could be free of his mind. But the Black Beauty whinnied and snorted, and its mane sparkled like the galaxies of the black night, and he wished it wouldn’t be true, he wished it would go away and the manicness would stay for another week, but God was against him, and wished to send him into the torturous pits of Hell that Sonic would say didn’t exist, and he could only grin and smile and laugh that the Black Beauty wasn’t here, but the horse continued to laugh too, its cold breath so visible in white puffs of smoke, and he knew that he was doomed to live a miserable existence, much like his parents thought he would.

Knuckles was gone again. Out to breakfast. Of course. With his smelly shoes near the vent, pilfering through Sonic’s nose and making him want to vomit. Knucklehead wasn’t very neat. It was his wife who did all the cleaning. And he wished she was here too, so she could clean up the entire mess that this hospital was. The dust and the blood and the stains of shit and piss were still evident in the hallway and the other rooms, as the janitors only decided to fully mock the patients inside and only haphazardly wash away the filth, the stains of the past still there, ready to be observed by the other patients, to know their stories, but not their names (as names of past patients were confidential in hospitals, but their thoughts of them were the same as they heard and saw their story, name given or not). They could see the story behind Sonic’s madness, the story behind why that man pissed himself, the story on why one man played with his feces, the story on their madness is seen through the stains that the janitors didn’t clean, and they only scoffed, wiped away dust with their Lysol wipes with only one swipe, and they continued to get their paycheck while they complained of how much the hospital smelled and how crazy everyone was. And Sonic thought that was simply unfair, that they could talk about them whenever they wished, and that the secrets of these patients who the janitors could easily learn their names could be revealed, and he thought again of the Black Beauty, on how the men could only wish to see how much he suffered when she was around, and he could only hide his head in his hands and groan and moan of the sun that tapped his back when it arose, stronger and more vivid, and he knew even though he wanted to remain in bed and suffer from the blackness of his mind, and he wanted to remain in the blackness of his room and never see the light again, but he had to get up, else the hospital would force him up. And he wanted to save himself the embarrassment.

As soon as he was hit with the bright lights in the dayroom like a bat to the head (being adjusted so much to the dark as the Black Beauty made him wont to do), he saw the breakfast of today: some fake bacon and eggs. They were frying the pigs and making them squeal and sizzle under the heat of Wonderland and turning them into bacon that was considered “healthy” by American hospital standards. He was hungry, however, and was willing to shovel whatever shit he could in his mouth to prevent himself from starving. Some of the patients here died of starvation, he was reminded by some of the doctors, and if his mania lasted any longer, he surely would’ve died of the same cause. Food just wasn’t attractive when he was manic. It slowed him down. If you had something in your stomach, you were simply sluggish and you wanted to sleep it off, so he couldn’t see himself eating the hospital’s food that made him tired and want to follow the staff’s orders (as one schizophrenic patient thought he saw transmitters inside the food. Maybe that wasn’t far from the truth. If only he wasn’t so insane.) So he just drank the decaffeinated coffee and juice and called that his breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Nothing but coffee. Nothing but black steamy liquid that didn’t even keep him up at night unless he told himself it had caffeine in it. The nurses told him to not drink so much of it, but after you got a nice taste of it after a while, Wonderland State Hospital’s coffee actually wasn’t so bad. Transmitters or no.

He ate while he read Josephine’s letter. She seemed to act a little out of character for her, saying that she really wanted him home. But all he could write back to her, other than what happened and how she didn’t believe him when he talked about the world of Wonderland, was that he couldn’t, and there was nothing he could do about it but say goodbye to life for an entire year. No high school graduation. No working with pops at the steel mill. No more of his fanciful cooking either, or his mother bitching. All of that was gone. Just madness for a year straight. Just threats of burning the hospital down, a child suffering from losing his parents and losing his life for two years, an echidna who couldn’t clean his own room or even eat with his moth closed, watching an old man rant about the government and that the entire economy was going down the shithole because of the president, all of that for one entire, cold, lingering year. And Sonic could only find a black crayon and he began to write, the black rivers in his mind beginning to unfold as he wrote and wrote and wrote:

Dear Josephine,  
Do you have any idea on how strong this hospital is? I can’t get out of here until a year they said. And that’s fucking final. I know you want me, I know you want me around you again, but there’s nothing I could do, so you better tighten your lace panties and keep them inside your dress because none of that is going to be coming with me when I get out. You don’t seem to believe me when I talk about Wonderland. You don’t seem to believe me at all. But I can tell you one thing: they have power in here, enough power to make their patients shrivel and fall to their knees and wriggle like the little worms they are, because patients are nothing but the pieces of shit that power the entire place. Shit can do a lot for the ground you know dear Josephine! It revitalizes the earth, it makes it new and holy, like Christ when he was crucified, and surely, surely you can’t stop them to get me out of here? What can you do dear ol’ Josephine, what can you do? Nothing. As long as Dr. Splinter is here, there’s nothing you surely can do to stop him except go to that world I talked about and kill him in there. I keep getting injured Josephine, I keep getting cuts and scratches and little bruises in my eyes and knees and shoulders and lips, and this is surely how you want me? To be a nice cut piece of meat that has been beaten and bruised over time? I might need a piece of steak to cool down my eye, and we can’t go to a steakhouse to solve that problem. 

Ribeye does wonders to the poor and hurt. It fills them up, it makes them happy, it makes them cured. And I’m about cured to perfection before I’m layered with sauce and sent to the damn grill my dear sweet perfect naive Josephine. You don’t know anything about Wonderland, it is a terrible place, and they will keep me in here for years until I stab Dr. Splinter in the damn face with a stake (a different steak you see my dear sweet ol’ Josephine), and that is what I’m going to do dear, I’m going to kill him, and I’m going to cook him like the fucking pig he is and have some nice pork chops. That’s what he does to everyone else anyways. If only you saw one of our patients, Miles (he’s in the Chronic Ward, which I already told you about before), he has to burn all the old patients in the Disturbed Ward into ashes like Hitler did with the Jews, and trust me, it breaks him, that he’s somehow the murderer of all these people. And if he doesn’t kill any of these people, then Splinter gives him a nice touch of electroshock therapy. Would you like that, my dear sweet innocent lovely china-faced Josephine? To kill so many of these people and then just given electroshock therapy if you don’t follow his orders, or worse, become a drooling stump of a person that actually used to be a working, functioning man like I used to be? The time is almost up my dear sweet putrid goddamned shit-faced Josephine, and I’m going to get everything I ever deserved, when I was going to kill myself on the highways, when I tried to kill myself one Christmas eve, when I tried to kill myself here, and probably numerous other attempts I made in the past to give up my last breath to Satan, the evil head nurse, head doctor even, of this goddamned ward, and I will see you in Hell my lovely porcelain god Josephine, right when I vomit into your mouth and you swallow it all down in your throat when I pull the lever, oh how it burns the putrid disgusting mess I have concocted inside here, and maybe you can understand everything, my dear. Maybe you can understand what it’s like to be a patient. A pig that’s ready to be eaten to the Gods of the rich and the famed.

Maybe I will do what they tell me not to do and take one of their razors they hide in the nurse’s ward and slice my wrists with it, see the nice flow of blood like sweet whiskey (that I could really get myself to drinking right now if this hospital actually had a cabinet full of so many drinks. A Coke and rum wouldn’t be so bad either, God willing) that comes from my veins, and maybe you can tell me that I’m not suffering, that I am a man of pure health, that I can function in this world without Society’s help. Or so you tell me. Or so you tell me with the blood that stains everyone. My blood. That will soon be your blood on your hands.

I am a hedgehog of no constitution at all, Josephine and my mother. I am a urchin, a hedgepig, that has nothing to look forward to in this disgusting life that continues to tease me with this golden light and then only tell me I’m going to put my face full of more decay, more death, more pigs, more knives, more of this Dr. Splinter continuing to ruin me and everyone else who now basically has a home here. This is my home Josephine. I was born here, with the flicker of madness that constantly makes me run in this wheel of life, like a hamster, you know, and I was destined to be here to have everyone know of my life where I died very slowly. And soon that is what will happen, I will die here, and you only have this letter to know of it. They will never have my dead body, because I will die in Wonderland, in the game the King of Spades created, and you will only know of my diseased life once you look through it with this kaleidoscope that has the jagged edges, all of various different colors, blue red yellow green who the hell cares? I know only that my sickness will have me here, and I will be defeated here, as was my destiny when I met this damn doctor. I have no hope I will make it out of here alive. I have no hope at all, that nice little lady with the golden wings like threads of silk from the finest worms of China, she is gone, and I only have you to blame and my parents and everyone else who made me like this and only think that I am a normal hedgehog like everyone else. No, I was a corpse when I was born, and just now when my death comes here, swift and painless and full of mercy it will be, it will be the moment where I begin to live, where I am a hedgehog made of the same fur and flesh as you.

I will see you in Hell, my lovely, fair, provocative, luscious, golden, sweet, mercy handed, bosom-breasted, dear, barbecue roasted, squealing, snout-faced, bastardious, fuckerful, bitchy Josephine, and maybe one day you will only understand of the Black Beauty, the horse that rides in dark waves with its starful eyes and hair and as it marches into the galaxies beyond ours, you will only know of the darkness my brain can withstand, and it’s an awful lot you know, it’s a hell of a lot on what I have to deal with, and you never knew that. You never knew of anything I have stabbed in my brain and welted and only boarded over so everyone can complain. The wooden heart is on fire now, and there’s no saving it. The old house it used to be, all the memories we had, all the shit we went through, it’s nothing anymore, and I wished it could’ve been something, but it wasn’t. It was only my drunken thoughts, when I was drunk of the high speeds my brain go through, on the words you said, on everything I told myself. I was drunk of all of that, and there I go again with the vomiting metaphors, but you know what happens after you drink enough and your body tells you no more man, I had enough of this shit! 

I had enough of this shit too, I told myself. Too much of it.

Sonic

He felt like a writer late at night, with a cigar in his mouth and a glass of wine near him with a typewriter, going full speed with his ramblings and what was basically his suicide note, and everyone watched and stared as he finished this piece, this masterful work of shit, being glamorized in the great light of the hospital, the black crayon nearly peeling themselves off the page, and he could only laugh, drink more of the coffee, tasting like the red wine he would drink if he was really a writer, and he kissed the manuscript and then stuffed it inside an envelope that he addressed to Josephine and his parents.

Then he drew a picture of the Black Beauty, the horse with the red stone cut eyes and the demonic ears and the stars it carried on its tail as it went through galaxy after galaxy, killing all of the children he chose with his touch of madness, and he continued to snicker and laugh as the nurses treated the wound on his eye, the blazing scar that he wanted the world to remember when he was gone.

“Sonic Thaddeus Seabrooks.”  
“Yeah?”  
“Take your medicine.”  
He grinned.  
“Nope, won’t be taking that today, miss. But I know what will cure me.”  
“What would that be, Mr. Seabrooks?”  
“Whiskey. And a bottle of sleeping pills so I can rest my maniac head for the night. Whiskey calms me and it’s the only thing that could help in a time like…”  
“Mr. Seabrooks, we are not going to give you any alcoholic drinks, definitely not any time soon, as it could mess with what the medications are supposed to…”  
“Fuck the medication! Fuck the entire hospital system, and especially fuck you!”  
The blue mad hatter is at it again, Knuckles thought to himself. And he calls me the knucklehead? Forget it.  
“Then would you like to be injected again? You are acting out Mr. Seabrooks, and…”  
“It will be my pleasure if you stabbed me again! Just stab me right in the heart and kill me why don’t you? I need to be dead, I need to be free, and I need to get out of this damn place before I die any further, before I’m even more of a corpse than I already am!”  
“Then hold still Mr. Seabrooks, while we…”  
“Not in my ass! In my heart! In my heart, fucker!”  
Even some of the others who tried to ignore the agitated patients making up a show for everyone to see, even Amy, even Blaze, watched with wide eyes who couldn’t take them off this hedgehog who had certainly gone off his rocker.  
“We’re not going to stab you in the heart, Mr. Seabrooks…”  
Mr. Seabrooks. Always Mr. Seabrooks one of the nurses called him. He never wanted to be a Seabrooks, not since he was born, the entire family of Seabrooks were Catholic folks that he couldn’t care to be with, what he wanted to be was a Himself, and only a Himself. Sonic Thaddeus Himself. It sounded nice in his head. It had a nice auric ring.

He kept kicking them in the face, he kept punching and yelling and screaming and throwing things, that the nurses and even the men in the hospital couldn’t wholly subdue him as he gutted out his wretched cries.

He saw something red and black approach suddenly that Sonic thought the Black Bitch was making him see in his Technicolor madness, a torpedo of scales and teeth and wickedness, as the creature stared at him with scarlet eyes and told him that he might as well lose this fight, because there was no point in fighting at all. It was pointless it said. It was useless it said. And the creature roared, seeing how his fangled mouth shined in the dawn’s light, and he suddenly saw a hedgehog emerge from the reptilian face, one wearing a red hunter’s cap, who seemed to suddenly smoke a cigarette and he thought he could see him roll the white thin paperstick in his baseball mitt, until he dropped it on the black and white tiled floor that looked like a Rorschach test and he said, “Enough, phony. That’s enough drama for one day. I command you to stop.”

And suddenly his muscles relaxed. Suddenly his eyes dropped and suddenly he no longer knew what he was doing or why he was fighting the staff. Suddenly he dropped to the floor, as his letter to sweet, dear, ol’ pitiable Josephine floated near him, the black crayon crushed underneath the staff’s feet during the struggle. The nurse that called him Mr. Seabrooks helped the other staff members carry him into the white room, as her blue heels ground it into dust, black dust that was reminiscent of plastic to the others. 

“Mr. Seabrooks will be out for a while. The show’s over, go back to what you were doing. No Mr. Flock I’m afraid we can’t give you anymore medicine after what happened last time with you. No Miss Rose you will have to remain in your seat, I won’t talk about what Mr. Seabrooks did any longer. Mr. Eastwood, will you be joining group today?”

And so on. Their last names continued to echo throughout the hall. No one wanted to be reminded of their first names. They were simply stains on the floor, on the walls, on the couches. They would have to carve their first names with their fingers in furniture to even remember them and let others know that they were victims in the King of Spade’s charade.

The Black Beauty had more plans for him. His chosen child could only go through so much more before he went to another galaxy, in search of another victim.


	18. King Egghead, Broken Tongues

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Natural History" is a poem made by Sylvia Plath. I do not own this poem.

That lofty monarch, Monarch Mind,  
Blue-blooded in coarse country reigned;  
Though he bedded in ermine, gorged on roast,  
Pure Philosophy his love engrossed;  
While subjects hungered, empty-pursed,  
With stars, with angels, he conversed  
Till, sick of their ruler’s godling airs,  
In one body those earthborn commoners  
Rose up and put royal nerves to the rack:  
King Egg-Head saw his domain crack,  
His crown usurped by the low brow  
Of the base, barbarous Prince Ow.

\- Sylvia Plath

He watched the sun sink down to the earth’s lowly dirty body as he drove back to the ward’s parking lot, the yellow lights still prominent in his vision. In the rearview mirror, there were of things long forgotten and things he no longer looked in the past. He wished Wonderland State Psychiatric Ward would be one of them, but he was here, and after his vacation, he had to return to the insane guppies that wished for their needles and sugar-coated pills dipped in chocolate. They often shouted, wishing for the king’s men to be dead, but the doctor could only sigh, and say that he had returned, and he brought his clipboard, his examinations of the patients, his thoughts on the discoveries made by the great Dr. Splinter, the greatest fucking doctor he seemed to ever hear. He would hear of how smart he was, how capable he was, how generous he was for making a hospital for all the sick and for those who were too addicted to the brandy, the brown liquorice in the bottle ready to be swallowed by the forever hungry and the forever thirsty alcoholics, but his hands tightened on the wheel as he thought of how much he despised him, the great doctor with the silver coat that shined like a blade in the night, and he wished if that blade could be used against him, turning his coat of luxurious metals into sweet red wine.

And how it would drain to the floor. How the hospital would no longer be dark green and white, but a luscious red, the lips of Aphrodite. And it reminded him of how lonely he was, ah his loneliness that makes his body quake and his soul wretch out a wicked melancholic song that he only knew he would care to hear. The death of her so long ago still fresh in his mind, the red wet lips like the veins in his eyes, the cigarette she smoked that would be ignited by the passion of what they used to be, the years that rolled on too much too fast, the swift realization that she was dead now, he was fat now, he obeyed a man much shorter and much weaker than him, the only difference was that he had money, and he didn’t, and if he ever quit, he would put a stake in his head as fast as he could say, “I’m gone”. Dr. Splinter, the man who used to been so generous, so smart, so kind, was now a man built of avarice and self-pity and a heart that was as black as the sun that only shined for the well and sane burnt it to a crisp when he set it out to dry. Dr. Splinter was very much a piece of dog shit that lied out in the sun. And Dr. Robotnik was very sure that he would step on it soon, and feel it sticking to his shoe, the very filthiness of the disgusting doctor that always knew where he was going, who would always track down his every step.

The doctor, how he sickened him. But yet he still had to work with him. But yet he returned, to get his meager paycheck to spend time with patients who had their mouths agape like carp. Some of them were the same rustic color as them, the brickhouse red that he wished Dr. Splinter would be someday too. The most beautiful colors of all were red black and blue. And they were just so close to the flag of the United States. After all, this country was founded on black red and blue from the battles they faced with the Indians and the British. Every single damn country was founded under the black red and blue spectrum, the dark colors that seemed to bleach this entire hospital.

The silver teeth of the hospital still shone as the sun continued to run down the world, the horizon a bloody eye like his. It’s been a while since he slept.

He stepped out of the car. Fall was coming. With their oranges and golds and reds. There was only one color he cared about and would see a lot more in this hospital, in this other world that was created by the dead. The dead he sacrificed for the good of Dr. Splinter, the man with the ambition, the man with the silver-coated dreams.  
Oh how he wished that silver-coated red-burned man would die. He would slice him apart with his own coat, the sharpness of the knife that would shine on this black-tinged night, the light of the moon smiling upon it.

He thought he would smoke a cigarette before he went back to Hell. Even God granted people one last cigarette before he sent people to the pits of damnation and flames and fury of the god that only could breathe black words and black remorses, with his serpent tongue and fangs sinking down to the flesh of the sinned and the flesh of the regretful and the ones with so much pity. Just like Dr. Splinter would, if he was dead. Oh how he wished the midget who wore a fucking tie with a goddamned t-shirt, would fucking die and be fucking roasted on Satan’s grill. And he pilfered through that cigarette, so much black acid smoke puffing from his nostrils, whirling it around, teeth white pasty bleached and demonic and full of sin itself, as he thought so much on how he wished the old doctor would die, and his plans on getting him to die one day, as he thought so much on how he wanted to be the captain, the marshal of Wonderland, and create this world on his own, his great Egg Empire, with his crown made of gold and mercury, the hands that toiled on it died of the smoke they inhaled while creating it for their great, wonderful master that they praised to high heaven, that they praised to all of the gods in their skies, and soon he would be as celebrated like the Greek gods in the constellations made of white ink on a black canvas like the Japanese scrolls, like children’s connect the dots, and he could only laugh as maniacally as the laughter that came from the hospital itself, the dark green and white, scaly, and made of fragile seaglass monster that was called Wonderland State, and he could the silhouette of one of the patients that decided to crack open his sputtering shard, the patient that he saw before he left, the late great maniac-depressive Sonic the Hedgehog, who wrote an entire night’s worth of tears and blood and regret and shit that he wrote to his dear sweet as an apple that blossomed in June Josephine, and he laughed and laughed and laughed that he was a hedgehog who now lived in the castles that literature described as a moor, with the high brick altars with the rough salty blades of the sea crashing down beside it, wanting to break it down, break down the mad man that wished for so long to see his sweet Annabelle Lee.

The hedgehog’s voice called for brandy and wine and vodka, and the nurses said no sir you can’t have wine with your medication it’s a very bad effect for you it might make you tired and he said no ma’ams I would rather be struck with your needles to my veins the sweet medicine singing in my blood with a golden bell ring and they said no and he was struck in the ass and he was now inside the white pillowed room of broken minds and broken thoughts.

The cigarette was now black ash, there was nothing more that could be salvaged from it, no more nicotine and tar and arsenic. The hospital beckoned him to come. And to come to the place where angels could no longer sing, he will. He will when he knew that he needed money in his pocket, when he needed to feed himself and his dog named Saturn.

Saturn was a strange name for a dog, but he didn’t care. He was alone now, and when you were alone, you made stupid decisions. Like naming your dog after a planet. Mickey Mouse did it, but of course Pluto wasn’t a planet anymore. It was a cold rock in the far reaches of space like this hospital was, and he grinned with his machete teeth and he rolled up his dirt-staunched hands again and he said, “Back to work.”

And so he was there. The Kingdom of Spades had a new ruler, King Egg-head. He quite liked that. Everyone always called him a egg-head when he was young, and he would show that he was just as ambitious when he was young, just as admirable and intelligent than what happened so long ago, about fifty years.

Back when Wonderland was actually a respectable institution.

He crushed the cigarette under his foot, the ember of the stick extinguished.

Much like Sonic’s mind.

 

—

The agony of the white filtered room  
The white on white and the soft on soft  
The voices of the trite beyond the door  
The ghosts of the dead hidden above the loft  
I seek, I seek  
I seek you under the lip-stuttered cries  
I seek you when my mouth is in such a array  
God peace be with me when my mind,  
My scarlet and wounded and black bitten mind  
Will not be led astray!  
I seek you under the sharp screams of the wind  
I seek you when my eyes must search for the  
Violet tinge  
In your body  
The organs, so pretty when arranged for the  
World to see  
The doctor takes out your brain  
Oh see how lovely it was carved  
How starved your voicebox  
Giving birth to so many fetuses  
In your words  
You start the fire in the world  
Now finish it  
And let it burn in its rustic blue throated  
Scars  
And let me eat  
All there is to eat  
To lead the rebellion  
In God’s uprising  
To no longer suckle at the new Christ’s teat

The world was a blur again, much like he was in this world. An undeveloped shape for those that were trained to see the world all in its rigidness and correctness, the sharp lines that formed in all the colors, and they couldn’t ever color beyond it no, those were the boundaries of Reality, but in Wonderland, the children colored wherever they want. Just amorphous blobs everywhere, and Sonic felt that he was nothing but like the very paintings he hated. The abstract ones with no idea and no thought on what it all meant, no thought on the color and presentation and if it really served a purpose in the art world. His head and body ached, bitten with the throb of the needle, and as he laid in the room, watching as the white ran across the room and the lights blared in his eyes and he created green phantasms as they danced on the floor and on the walls, if it wasn’t for the Thorazine in his system, he would’ve smiled and laughed and laughed again that the Black Beauty was making him suffer again under her night-glided hooves and her night-kissed mane and tail, and he wished that the sadness would leave him, that the parasite would leave his mind and make him a sane and rational hedgehog again, but the Black Beauty wasn’t done with him yet. She said her child had to suffer a little more, so she pushed the knife further in his flesh, and she smiled too. She smiled that her child had to be sacrificed to the great god of chastisement, the great god of suffering and misery and he was in league with the horsemen of the Apocalypse as well and he saw Sonic a suitable host for the Black Beauty to dwell in, the blue sea of his mind becoming filthy, touched with garbage and dirt, and he could only sigh as he breathed in all of the air, made the sea toil a little with its ruddy dirt chocolate and white creamy foamed teeth, and he sat. He could sit and sigh and watch the earth grumble before his feet, as he was locked inside of the padded cell, and the only thing he could play with his were his fingers and teeth and bones.

He thought of gods that had to suffer with being alone. Like Prometheus when he was chained to the side of the mountain, only to be fed by the eagles with their knife mouths and their talons ripping and tearing and loosing the string of his eye and his spleen, and they feasted over his organs, how lovely bloody they were with their black veins and their black breaths, and of course there was that one eagle who would pluck out his heart, all the strings loosened from his machine body, but he would never die. He would only come back to the same day as before, with the sitting on the cliff side, lonely, no one to talk to but the rocks and earth and sky (but the gods won’t listen) as the eagles continue to poke and stab and rip through your flesh like a child with construction paper, and he thought on such an existence. He felt he already was Prometheus, as he discovered fire, the fire in his mind that was forever unquenched by the things it knew it could burn down, but everyday the nurses came, and they would stab the needle in him, a pinprick of skin, through the fur and skin and veins, and he would die, then be reborn again a few hours later, as he could feel his heart being torn out with a scalpel each day by these strange white pallid aliens that wore the hat with the red cross, saying that they knew how Jesus suffered and that they would help Him and help you too, but they were simply creatures who were curious about your body, and they would do anything to see how it functioned, even if it meant removing everything that was a part of him, his heart his lungs his tongue his eyes, and as they cradled the needle of Thorazine in their hands, swaddle it with cloth, kind caring and concerned, they would just place it under his skin again, until his mind dazed and he was no longer awake, under that cold morgue night as the sun becomes more orange and fiery, and so do the trees. And the wind becomes more savage, more frozen in its glass scales, and he could only count how many sheep crossed the fence as he thought to himself of all of these things, all of the gods who suffered like him, all the gods who were mad like him, all the gods who were nothing like him and the gods who were gone and no longer existed.

He wondered how long it would take him to not exist.  
He counted the many seconds, the many minutes, the many hours he would be in here.

His eyes scraped the very room, finding all the blinding white, the pure, unadulterated, innocent white frightening to him.

He needed it to darken and burn. To whisk away in a black coil. He needed it to die.

If only he still had matches. If he only still had Bean, who could make a fire out of Lysol and ammonia.  
Burn down the King.

Burn down the singing angels that rested in his mind and were mournfully singing the heroes of long past in Wonderland.

Burn down himself.

Burn down the whole entire land.

The black coils undulated inside the ward. The red and black, two of the most beautiful colors in the whole world, began to seek him, and with his bloody Mary ringed eyes his great razored mouth wanted to tell of the world of one of those forgotten heroes under of what Wonderland used to be, so long ago, nearly 50 years ago it was, when the hospital was respectable, clean, safe, and Dr. Splinter was a man who was not hungered by power and sorrow. His stomach did not know of hunger, his mind did not know of wanting more, so he was simply what they considered a “good man”, but days rolled and lingered past, and the beast that came wanted to remind him of what people they used to be, of what creatures lurked and soiled in the hospital walls now, of the moaning men who told all the white aliens to “feed them”, but they didn’t know what to feed them with, but they assumed turnips and radishes.

His eyes shook under the white light that was as blinding as darkness, as the creature stood over him, and he shrugged. “You got it in the ass again with those nurses. They warned you. I even warned you. To not near The End so much. I swear you’re going as loony as a goddamned monkey in a banana truck.”  
He laughed a little, and smirked. “Ah, Shadow. I never knew you’d be in here. I’m getting bored of being in here all by myself.”  
“Yeah I know, especially since the hospital is apparently so exciting to you that you need to go insane every five minutes. I’m sure your friend Knuckles and Ambra won’t be ever bored with you around. You always bring entertainment to the ward, but I can assure you, this isn’t always a good thing, phony. Definitely not a good thing.”

“Well, what can I do? The hospital gets so boring that I feel like I have to shake things up a bit. Make our sad little lives have something going on. After all, I’m probably going to be stuck in here for a year, might as well have some fun, right? Sometimes the hours seem to droll on for so long that you just want group to come by so you can hear the dramas in everyone else’s lives. Just so you’re not focusing on yourself so damn much. That’s the problem with these places, you just focus on yourself so much that you might as well melt to a puddle under the might of your mind, because you start to see that all those big flaws in you…they’re bigger than what you originally thought. You just pick and scab at yourself until you’re nothing but muscle and bone. We’re chickens who see a spot of blood in someone else’s feathers that we pick and pick and pick until they are nothing but rotted skin. So I have to distract myself. I have to go crazy once in a while in here. Otherwise I would bleed so much that I would have no more blood in me. You see what I mean?”

The fragile white glass of bones that he held under the blue and pale sheets of his body. He wondered how fragile they really were. To shatter all over the place after a drop from a seven storey window. He thought it would be nice to see the all of the emerald-lined clear cut shards all over him, his body now nothing but an amorphous slug that feared salt on his tongue and the salt of his tears. He would move his body on his belly, like a snake that hungered for sanity after he devoured so many virgins, so many white suckled piglets that ran in his eye like the glass his bones used to be. He thought of himself as only the serpent that told Eve to bite in the apple, the snake who caused all the sin and insanity in such a pure innocent babied garden, a newly pink world, and Shadow could only cluck, or at least attempt to cluck, as there was something wrong with his mouth, torn and ripped and hooked it was, the leech he was, to satiate on his words.

“You have teeth, Sonic. You have a tongue. Why can’t you use it to say rational things, phony? Why can’t you be a rational human being like everyone else, huh phony? To march in a single line, to do things like get a job, obey your boss, shit in the same toilet like everyone else, get money, learn of how the world really works, and you’re in here, suffering, shriveling, like the worm you are, with your lips made of little shrewd teeth like I used to have, your little grovelling pink muscle trying to speak of the words that I can say even though I only have the broken halve, the bloodied stump that I have to speak with, the keyhole in the madness I hold. We speak in twisted tongues now Sonic my phony my faker my pyrite friend, and only mine can half curl, because something happened to it, that made it gone, that made it stolen in Dr. Splinter’s lair of his, and if I tell you, will you also take the fall with me? Will you also have the same half twisted tongue that I have, long ago when this hospital used to been made of praise, made of the respect of so many people who still have it half-dead in their thoughts, as the man with the white suit stole it. People still think of him as a man, but inside he is a pig like the rest of us. He is a worm, he is thin and slit. Let me tell you of the things I witnessed, the things I buried, the things I withheld in my fiery hands and in my fiery thoughts, otherwise, you will never get out of here Sonic. You will never get out.”

The bloodied sackmeat that was rancid near his throat. Sonic could see it. The raw carcass of words that were once said that had a lick of a sense, the sanity he still held in his head, was now gone, the other half of it inside the white room, the very same cottony cloud room he was in, the throbbing brain slug that was his tongue. The pink serpent that Sonic wanted to be.

The words that are now said. The fibrous sense they make, they are falling and scathing and Sonic couldn’t see how this world, this world that was ugly and cold and black, made any sense to him. Someone else was writing this story, this other halve, and he couldn’t see who it was, the black hooded man with no face who had no tongue and therefore no brain, as the Black Beauty made him ride, his brain nearing the surface of the dirty ocean of mind, and he thought he would suffocate under the very bloodmeat of Shadow’s mouth.

Half shrunken, half decayed, the hole in his thoughts that were shot through by a man covered by the moon.

The moon was on his side, and he wasn’t sure if the sun was on his side.

I am the man you speak of. The one who suffered millions of fortnights in here, my body bare and naked and wet from the hydrotherapies, as the man took away everything from me that made me me. The smokebolts that seized my mind that made me different, made me into a different skin that I couldn’t fit, I am someone who suffered for so long for what seemed to be God’s days in this goddamned morgue, with the pallid white sheen of their faces looking at my corroded bell jar and they think, that is the man who lost the tongue and cannot speak. That is the man who lost his tongue and cannot speak.

Speak of simple phrases, they won’t get any more complicated when you only have half a tongue.

There were two of me. The other half torn away from the moon.

Go to Dali. See the King of Spades. Give me my other self. The bluebells will tell you a song, of the very blue butterfly bushes that dance around the garden, and the wings have eyes that knew all of my suffering, the glass shard peacock fiery flames!  
I cannot get much simpler.  
I cannot get more sad.

The fangs grew larger and more shrewd and cut, the eyes became slits in bloodied wallpaper, the fur became scales that reflected the white sorrow and his hands became claws that reached for his neck, his tail swished and swashed, and he roared and he spoke of agonies past. His nostrils flared, his long slender body panged for mice and sin and gluttony, and he thought he would seek Sonic’s heart. A feast of the broken minded hedgehogs who lived in here, and he thought he could feel his nails scrape scrape scrape through his skin and through his long wires of life, and he thought he told him to eat him, because it was the only way he could live. To eat and eat and eat. It was how men survived through the years, and it was the only way Shadow would survive too.

The Black Beauty pulled away the knife, and she cradled it, and the psychosis ended.

“Mr. Seabrooks.”

He sat, in the white shade of the pillows, the nurse’s red candied lips pursing expectantly as he seemed to talk to a phantom that wasn’t there, someone who was dead long ago, but the nurse couldn’t see it. She didn’t had the stone cut eyes.

“It’s time for lunch, Mr. Seabrooks.”  
He had a tongue. He could eat.  
Some people didn’t had one.  
Like Shadow.

He left the soft cottony room, the tap tap tap of her shoes clicking throughout the halls, as the blue hedgehog met the knucklehead and the red fox, and he thought of how to get the pink one to join their crew.


	19. The Black Beauty's Disease

Death is something that anyone hardly knows about. We all know what can cause death (drug overdose, suicide, diseases, murder, making your dad a dead head Fred, having the Black Beauty take that knife and stir it in your gut so much that your organs are all mixed up and you can feel them knot and you can feel the bloody red hole ready to drip them from your stabbed and fucked carcass), but we don’t know what happens after death. Death is a strange thing to think about, is it not? What happens after it? Where do we know where God is taking us after we die? Heaven? Hell? Inside this mental hospital, with all of its insufferable patients, with that insufferable hedgehog and that insufferable bear and just the lot of them are all insufferable, that I can’t stand being in here anymore! Would death take me away from this awful place and to a place that’s better than here? No. Because I am God in here, and this is the afterlife. The afterplace when all your souls die. Sonic’s died right when his parents shoved in their faith of God into his brain, not telling him of who the real God is. Knuckles will never see his child and his wife again. No, his anger caused his soul to rot and wither away, it caused his personality, his tranquility to be shit out from his scummy body, and I see Amy Rose, the daughter to the father who may be a cocaine kingpin, with so much luxury and so much pleasure that now she doesn’t know what to do, she feels like she can’t be pleasured, can’t be happy no more, because everything in the world that her daddy can give her will simply mean nothing to her! (Why didn’t she go to the therapist after she thought of becoming all those TV stars like Jamie wanted her to be? And why not? It’s simply because Amy didn’t want to tell her father she was diseased, her skin and soul black and oozing with red red shiny blood. She believes the people she always wanted to be like are in actuality fat stupid pigs. Pigs who have the money and fame now, but soon their dramatic life will be over with once we turn on the grill, once we get the ax and cut off their heads (look at the fresh blood that seeps from their head and how beautiful but yet tragic it is, to see the pigs squeal for their life that one moment you tear through their neck and their head is gone and you get to wear it like a mask) and we can have a cookout and the celebrities’ lives end in flames, especially with their drug use to escape the life they led. To escape from insanity. The drugs and pills, how they could possibly solve everything for everyone, but I was on pills once, and they didn’t work. They even made my condition worse, and I’m here, pretending to be a doctor. 

I took many pills. I took many antipsychotics, many mood stabilizers, many antidepressants, many beta blockers, many tranquilizers and sedatives, many recreational drugs, many yellow pills, blue pills, purple pills, black pills, red pills, small pills, big pills, pills the size of your thumb, pills the size of your nosehair, pills that made me sleepy, pills that made me angry, pills that made me sad, pills that made me lose control of everything in my life, pills that finally had me kill everyone in my family, leaving me alone and hated and scared and miserable and having me think only in black, pure malicious black like the pupils in your eyes. Did you know if you stabbed that center of the eye, its only blood that flows through there, and your eye will bleed? All eyes bleed. It is a fact of life. Like death. Sweet, merciful death that I wished can flow through my veins and make my heart stop beating. I want to drink it all in a great big chalice, I want to have it inserted through me like I was in death row, I want it sung to me by the sweet Celtic maidens of the night that surely belong to Morrigan, sweet merciful honeyed death! I will smile upon the heavens if the angels will give it to me, give it to their loving God, and maybe I will let life continue to transcend without me, to have them do what they like to do, without fear of heaven or hell or this place! But these lucky soullosers, they have lost everything and they are now here, within my grasp, and I certainly can’t leave them be! They are angels in need of guidance, they are animals who need humans to administer their medication, to give them love and support.

Like I never got.

Then there’s Bark the polar bear who isn’t telling me anything, then there’s Nack the weasel who committed a crime and decided he would get to the mental hospital instead of jail for seven years (but he might be here even longer with me around!), then there’s Blaze who was raped, abused, and wants to escape from here, to get away from all memories of his brother and her verbally abusive, drunk mother, then there’s Bean, who’s a pyromaniac who never had anyone to love him so he wants to set the world on fire, then there’s Big who’s retarded and her mother committed a murder, therefore he needs our assistance, and Tails whose parents were killed by a serial murderer, and there’s the children, and there’s the ones whose brains and hearts were torn from their bodies, as dead and gray as they could be, and there’s the staff, one of which is as insane as I am, but now she’s using her gifts to help others, isn’t that fucking grand! I hope she can help me, because no helped me, no one has ever loved me, much like my family, who I killed in cold blood, who I can still smell their blood on their hands (how sweet and innocent is the boy’s, how lovely and fragrant is the wife’s), as I stare at this man who told me of everything, who told me of all the things I must do to go to heaven, to get out of this Hell, who said my soul was very dirty and very packed in like the dirt in my nails (oh how dirty they could be that my mother constantly told me to clean them, over and over and over and over and over and over…) that I must kill and cleanse the people who have no souls, and that is what I must do. The mentally ill, they have no souls, they have misery and pain, like me, and I must bid them farewell on their journey to their favorite place in the world: Hell. Because I am God, and what I say, shall always flow, on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and

Dr. Splinter continued typing. On and on and on and on and on and on…

It was until he heard the door open, the light peeping from the crack as he shut himself into total darkness, that the rotund man came in with the waft smell of hamburgers, with the eyes that glimmered with so much sadness at the prospect of returning to work, as he saw crackling his hairy brown knuckles like fire, and he smiled as the man sat down in his chair, looked up at the folders of the patients he was supposed to see for their checkups, and he went to work, while slowly chewing on his fries, mulling over their saltiness with his tongue as he wrote about yet more pain and trauma from people he didn’t necessarily cared about.

“And what exactly are you typing, Aishwarya? A novel? You told me you were writing something about your experiences as a doctor, but I don’t want you to dilly around with that for now. I’m back, and I want you to know the status of what’s going on in the world we created. Is my empire being made? What about that blue hedgehog, Sonic, that one you talked about with the bipolar disorder who’s trying to reach that world? Has he done it? Has he defeated us in keeping it a secret with the other patients? Are we going to have to bring the heavy artillery into this?”  
Dr. Splinter ceased his typing, his bouts of flaming hell and madness, the flames coming from his fingers and into his typewriter as each of the little fingers of fire singed out each word, he could only stop and remind himself that he was a doctor, a pretend doctor, a doctor that he said he always wanted to be when he was a kid, playing house with this Dr. Robotnik who might as well have been a pretend doctor as well, and he sighed as he crackled his knuckles again and looked at the fire that he burned on the paper, the destruction he caused to his sanity as he let the flames crick and crack all these words from its orange yellow hands, the blue tip its pen.

“No. It’s not time for us to resort to such actions yet. Sonic has figured out the world of Wonderland, but I think it will be a long time, a very long time, before he will even discover the mechanics of it. From what I know of, he talked to Smirk, a patient I treated a long time ago, a man I saw with body dysmorphic disorder who suddenly had a heart attack under my care, and I heard he was planning on making an attack on the hospital on Christmas Eve. The man wants to get revenge on how badly I treated him when he was admitted. I know that Smirk is good friends with…a patient I treated a very long time ago, who also died under my care. But that was simply because their deaths would’ve fueled the world of Wonderland even further, and now Sonic is starting to understand what this hospital is all about.”

Even the smell of hamburgers couldn’t calm Robotnik as he could see the contours of Splinter’s face, one side gleaming under the light, the glasses appearing with a white spark, and so was his deranged smile, the shining pearly teeth that on closer inspection were stained with coffee, cigarettes, and blood. He could hear the wind howl, the tendrils blowing out to the hospital office, making a whining, mournful noise before Splinter hid his face further into the darkness, then continued.

“However, Sonic is catching on to our activities quickly. He can tell that I give my patients a peaceful death by giving them a heart failure over suffering with their mental illness. If we did the same to him, the staff would catch on. They would know that all of these patients are dying off like the miserable lot of flies they are. So, I say we try to get Sonic to be a little happy, to trust ol’ Dr. Splinter, to ease his suffering inside this dilapidated place. I say on December we let him off the six month wait early and let him go on the Christmas trip for ice cream and shopping like we do every year. And maybe we’ll even give him some actual good food, like maybe a chili dog now and then. I say we spoil Sonic and make his search for me inside Wonderland a little bit slower, otherwise if we let him go early in the hospital, the staff will notice and we will lose a great source of power. And when you see great power like that, I say you use it and abuse it as much as you can. Power rarely comes and goes, and all my life I never had such power, and I say I will let it live in the palm of my hand for as much as I can before I crush it with my spindly little fingers, the fingers that people always told me would never lead to any good, would never do anything for my life. And I say ‘prove them wrong, Aishwarya. Prove the whole damn lot of them wrong’.

“Aishwarya…” The doctor hesitated asking such a question, but he barely knew much about his henchman. The one who was sewing the world before them. He heard that he had a troubled life, knowing that he once had a wife and family, but he never heard of what happened to them. He never heard of how Splinter was in charge of this hospital, with this scheme to create a world from the creative minds of so many dead patients. Robotnik chewed on his fries and mulled over it again. He realized what he was doing would be considered “evil” to the staff person’s, to the patients’ eyes, but ultimately, he was doing this for the good of people in the end. To create a world where there was no mental illness, no disease, and no racism and no sexism and no sins and no lost and broken souls and no hurting hearts. He wasn’t sure what the doctor himself was doing, but he thought that it was for something evil, unlike him. That he was substituting a different reality, because he couldn’t stand the reality he was in now. As if his eyes and brains couldn’t see the world clearly, as everything simply moved too fast for him, everything in blurs, everything not forming in the lines, and he could see the smears, he could see where the colors were supposed to go into, but he couldn’t tell what they were supposed to form. His brain ran quickly, on a hundred little scuttled feet like a centipede, as he thought over his life, how he was the despicable man he was today, and he could only grin of his crooked grin, with the stains from the past cigarettes and mugs of coffee and of the flesh he ate of his dead patients still lingering in his jagged sheens.  
“I am a man who is hurt very much, Ivo. I am a man who cannot think of the same reality you are in right now. My brain is hurt, as much as my heart hurts over the things I’ve experienced, with my own flesh and blood toiled over their flesh and blood. I want their blood to be mixed in with mine.”

His glasses glinted in the direction of the picture frame he had on his desk, of his wife. Of his child. Who have been dead for a long time. Both of which he spread their veins out on the hospital, their heart beating in with the machines, the gears and machineries moving along with the beat of their breaths, and he wondered if they would be proud of him after he was through with this hospital.

They probably would never be, because the knife was still in their hearts, in their eyes. And he shoved them inside there. Because he thought it would be safer to die than to live.

“Although these people are dying of my own wretched hands, I am building a better utopia for them. I am building a better reality for everyone. Because I cannot stand it here. Every second I breathe in this pig-infested shitfest my lungs get corroded like those bell jars back there. They get gangrenous green and the ashes still rot inside, my insides doing the same thing. But ultimately, I want to create a better utopia for my sanity, to make every last shred of it that I have safe inside my kingdom, and I hope I can become the man I used to be. Or else I would just go ahead and slaughter everyone in this whole damn hospital like a butcher making the cut for his hungry fucking customers.”

Even if Robotnik had enough of listening to the drama of all these patients, he was especially curious of Splinter’s past, even if he thought he was only standing in the way of his plans. Learn more about him, and maybe I can exploit his weaknesses. Maybe I will create my perfect utopia instead of his!

“What happened that made you this way, Aishwarya? I always knew you were a strange man, but…”  
“Don’t call me strange. I don’t like it when people, especially you Humpty Dumpty, call me strange. Because they simply never understood me. They never understood of the visions I see day after day, of my wife and child pleading for me to create this perfect world for them. They tell me to add more lovely things, more scary things, more ugly looking things, more deadly things, and I tell them that is only the patient’s doing, I cannot do much more than that, but yet they continue to cry, they continue to pound their fists into my back as the knife in their eyes and hearts continue to make them bleed, and I feel that this is the only thing I can do to satisfy anyone. If I can’t satisfy any of my patients anymore, then I can only satisfy myself, and they all say that’s the most important person you should listen to, isn’t that true, Mr. Ivo? Obviously you’re doing this for your own gains too, trying to betray me so you can build your empire, but I can tell you that you’re lucky Eggman, because you’re still a valuable asset to my projects and plans, and you just got here, so I can’t just simply fire you when you just returned to the job. Anyways, make the patients feel at home with you (as much as you can, anyways) and eat your shitty burger and leave the rest of this work to me. Sonic is about to enter my kingdom next time he goes into Wonderland. And I will deal with him with respect and malice. Just do what your doctorate degree orders you to do and I will do what my spilled flesh and blood orders me to do. It’s simple, really. But do one more thing I don’t approve of and you’re fired. Got it, Eggman?”

He hated it every time he called him by that nickname. It was a door to the memories of children picking on him because he was overweight and looked like an egg that was ready to hard boil in the sun’s heat. But he was shocked that in that one single moment, Splinter knew what he would do to him, he knew of his wish to make a better society with this dream world, and now he was yet again in Splinter’s control, in the big brown hairy palms of his fist, ready to be crushed, ready for the yolk to come seeping from the egg, ready for the shell to burst in a yellow explosion.

All he could do was slowly sit down as the hospital lights began to awaken, the dark green and white walls shining with so much frosty light, unwrapping his burger from its yellow wrapper and taking one giant bite after another as he worked on Sonic’s file. And he didn’t taste anything of it, even when the ketchup began to stain the file and his shirt, which he promptly wiped off with a napkin leaving only a small orange stain that he hoped no one would notice.

And the hospital awoke with the light. The first of the patients to be up was Knuckles, who was used to waking up at 5 am due to his life out in the fields, tending to pigs and crops while taking care of his wife and son. And he realized as he watched the sun rise, its golden fingers stretching out and touching the daffodils and bluebells, he wished they were here with him. He wished they would know of the world beyond the hospital, that he got to tell his son yet another story before he went to bed of the world that was pink like a baby’s bloom and where paper cranes flew in the air and where paper fish ate paper flies and the sky turned a dark rich blue with paper lanterns as stars poking through God’s body (in this case, the patient’s insanity, as they were gods of their own world). He thought that was a story he could get into, but of course, he always listened intently to his stories, because Knuckles truly believed he was a great storyteller, something that his mother always told him before she died an awful death.

Oh my dear mother. May God let her rest her bones, and her colorful mind that always shone in shades of gray.

Little by little, the other patients rose from their slumber. Amy, looking expectantly at the lights, afraid they were going to hurt her if she made one wrong step that would make them angry and drop down to her precious little head and crush it, then Nack, who simply talked to the staff as cheerily as possible before reverting back to listening to the rock and heavy metal radio station as he thought over how he was going to escape this hellhole, then Bark and Rouge, who lied together and watched as the city lights began to dim off in the distant landscape beyond the hospital, who sneaked away before the staff would notice they violated the same rule they’ve been breaking for months, then Bean who was drowsy and begged for coffee, but the staff told him he was only allowed decaf and he wanted to yell and jump and scream in rage, but sleep held him off before he could raise yet another skirmish between him and the staff, then Blaze as she wished she was dreaming again and she wished she would die in her sleep (dying before she would realize she was dying), and the last one who was up was Sonic, who slept and slept the morning away, until the staff had to arrive in his room and try to wake him up by force.

“Sonic, it’s time for group. You have to get up. Doctor’s orders. Or else we’re going to grab you and take you off that bed and carry you to the group room ourselves.”  
No response. He simply snored, he simply thought of the beautiful horse that was riding through the black waves, telling him to sleep forever.  
“Sonic, we’re warning you! Get up! Now!”  
Still no response. He continued to sleep, but they could hear him muttering, what seemed to be “No, don’t stab me my great princess queen.”  
“Sonic! This is your last warning! Get up now, or else we will…”  
“Or else you will what?”

The man with the rotund appearance emerged before the staff, wearing his white suit (that appeared to have a small orange stain on it that he hoped no one would notice), and he watched as the hedgehog continued to talk in his sleep, as saliva dribbled off his tongue, as he continued to dream of the knife being plunged into his body, the volcanic spurts of blood splitting open his body and neck.

“Dr. Robotnik, it’s nice to see you again, but Sonic needs to wake up for group, and we’re trying very hard to help him because as you said in his files his behavior appears to be erratic and severely depressed, and…”  
“If he’s erratic and severely depressed, then do you think he needs his beauty sleep? He might’ve not slept at all in the last few hours, because one of depression’s symptoms is restlessness, is it not? How about letting him sleep for a few extra hours, maybe he’ll actually be in a better mood if you guys didn’t drive him crazy with getting him into group then a therapy session then lunch then yet more activities he would consider pointless if he hasn’t got the sleep he needs.”  
“But Robotnik, it’s stated in the rules…”  
“’Stated in the rules’? Forget the rules for a moment and think of the patient’s wellbeing! We can’t have them suffering all the time, can’t we? So many of them are dying of heart attacks simply because of what you’re doing to them! If you don’t give this hedgehog the rest he deserves, I swear I will fire you so quickly you won’t even get your first paycheck. Let him sleep! Let him rest! Wake him up in three hours and then give him to me. I’ll do an assessment on him, and trust me; he’s going to need all the sleep he can get when I’m through with him.”  
“But doctor…”  
“Enough! One more word and you’re fired! Got it?”  
“Yes si-…”  
“You’re fired.”

Sonic could hear the doctor as he drifted in and out of sleep, in an ocean of dreams, as he watched him as the knife cut through his skin, the pale fatty flesh searing with the gears and wires of the machine’s veins, and he thought his eyes fell from his skull and were replaced with bottle glass retinas, as the man spoke mechanically and maniacally, and he rode on his wheels and he told everyone to wake up, because this would be the moment they would die, as they were simply feasts to the machine. Stabbings of taste to the steel tongue.

—

Three hours later, it was 12 PM when Sonic woke. His quills were frayed and his face was glued shut of the moisture of sleep, his lips dry and cracked, his wounds sore of the battle that took place not so long ago. But he actually thought he would be glad to be back in Wonderland State Hospital, where the nurses would think he was hurting himself again, and they would treat him with cloth bandages and love and attention, and he would be back with the rest of the patients, resorting to their respective lunacies like clockwork. 2 PM was where Blaze rubbed the green leather seat over and over and Amy Rose cried, and Nack yelled at Bean to keep the TV quiet and Bean continued to watch Limbaugh speaking vehemently of what was wrong with America’s health care system. Something was wrong with it alright, if Sonic had to stay here for a year or longer, for an illness that wasn’t so severe in the first place, even if the black beauty was putting the razor next to his neck, making the fine neat beaded red lines before it would cut out his larynx and let him gasp and choke of blood. The health care system was flawed for him to suffer such things. He swore the Black Beauty wasn’t such a bitch ever since he was admitted. She was sometimes merciful. She would just sprinkle the sandman’s dust over his eyes and he would be constantly tired, and he would sleep all night and all day long, dreaming of sorrowful dreams but yet his mind couldn’t register that he was depressed, that the Black Beauty had other plans for him during this romp down Misery Lane. The Black Beauty still cradled that knife, she could see her down the hallway looking with her red, sullen eyes, as he prepared himself to go back to the dayroom, cleaning himself in the shower that only had one thin sheet for a curtain and only the dirt floor as it gathered up all the water in the drain, while the machine inside the hospital’s walls continued to drink, continued to breathe, continued to think. The more he listened to the walls, he thought the voice belonged to a woman, that was groaning help me…Please someone help me save myself from this hell…but right now Sonic didn’t know what to do. Because he was trying to save himself from his own Hell, and he thought he could see the red sullen eyes across the bathroom, carrying the knife in her rocking arms, staring off into space, ready to plunge it deep in his chest, ready to make him bleed for all the sins he caused ever since he was here.

But as soon as he was done showering, he could only see the flickering light of the eyes, much like rose-tinted candles ignited, and she disappeared, going down the hall, learning of the other patients, learning how much they were suffering, and telling them that they weren’t suffering like her, that everything she sees were black and everything smelled like shit and blood and piss and everything she felt felt like blades to her soft pale skin and everything she heard sounded like screams. While she continued to carry the knife in her bone thin hands, ready to raise it in the air, ready to slice, ready to kill anyone who had a fortunate life.

Or all of this was only a derelict daydream, that he was imagining the woman, that there were no bladed fingers, no bewitching eyes, no torn dress and no Misery Lane. He could be hallucinating the whole thing, only coming up with a farfetched story to tell to anyone who dared to listen to him. As he shifted through this low, he was living out a different reality, one not much different from the one he used to live in, except these supernatural things kept coming and going, of seeing that Shadow only had half a tongue, that Dr. Robotnik returned and he was kind and trying to do his best to treat his bipolar, even stating that sometime the next few months they would let him out of the hospital once in a while (as he thought the entire place was driving him insane. Didn’t it do that to everyone?), and that Amy sat on the green leather chairs with Blaze as she continued to slide her finger down the coating over and over, but yet she wasn’t crying like clockwork. She wasn’t showing how much pain she was dealing with. She only smiled, and wrote her little letter to her father telling him that everything was okay, and maybe in the next few months, she would be released. But that was one of the biggest lies she ever told herself, but even she wasn’t sure it was false. The hospital staff handed out drinks from powdered peach tea and she raised her plastic cup, ready to toast whoever was in good spirits and good health, but no one in the hospital was. Not even Dr. Robotnik, as he thought over on what a man Dr. Splinter really was.

Lunch was served. Some green beans (that were dried up) with a pork chop (that was dried up) with peaches (that were somewhat dried up) and corn (that had more flavor than the pork chop ever did). He toyed with the peaches, shifting them to the corners of his tray with a fork, as he watched Amy eat very little and lie to the staff that she was full. Of course she couldn’t be full, she barely ate enough that people thought she only lived on a single morsel of food for ten years, that she could only live on the water drops that dripped from the stalagmites from the cavern. And he could only think as he cut up the pork chop, the flavorless sack of meat that was as old and as gray as his father’s hair, on how he could get Amy to join him. Last he tried, she said he was insane and needed to be restrained by the staff and put into the Safety Room. But now he could only think that this entire mission in Dr. Splinter’s kingdom in Dali needed her, he needed to show her that the world was round and the sun shined for the insane ones too, and she couldn’t constantly live her life sucking in all her tears and feeding on their moisture and nutrients (only a little bit of sodium).

He placed his tray next to her on the green leather chairs, and Amy looked up apprehensively, waiting for the next bout of insanity to burst from his tongue.

He waited.  
His eyes shifted from his food to her.  
He looked at the limp green beans and only think Amy was as skinny as it.  
He waited some more.  
His mouth was silent, his eyes continued to poke through her.  
Amy could whimper a little through her thin lips.  
Silence.  
Waiting.  
God even stopped and paused at this moment, waiting from the approval of His angels before He made a new star.

“Amy.” He spoke.  
“What do you want? Can’t you see that you’re insane? Can’t you see that you’re going to hurt me, that I’m fine not living in your imaginary land where Splinter is the king of it, the Ace of Space or whatever, and that I’m getting out of here soon but yet I can’t stand the thought of leaving this place? I’m going to be going to the Chronics Ward in a week, and I know it’ll be a nicer place than here. The staff has to be extra nice to them. Because they are really hurting, and they are suffering from their condition, and I know I’ve been suffering from mine for a…”  
“The Chronics Ward is not a nice place, Amy. It’s dark. Cicadas grow on the walls and glow white and look like sticky sperm. There are children there that cry everyday. There’s a machine that feeds on the souls and bodies of the patients that don’t have a mind anymore. I know it. You can ask Tails. He has to get up every two hours to feed the machine, burning their bodies like in the Holocaust, reducing them to ashes, and the machine clicks with satisfaction, but yet there’s no way you could live with the fact that you killed someone. You can’t go in there Amy. I won’t let you.”  
“And how are you going to stop the staff? How are you going to make them change their minds? If everything you’re saying is true, then you should stop them right now. You should show you’re ready to fight for me, because you can’t stand letting me suffer anymore. I never had anyone care for me Sonic, not even Jamie, who was supposed to be my boyfriend. Do you see the black marks, the ringlets around my wrists?”

She showed him her wrists, which were bruised, pitch black as the starless sky, the veins hidden in the vastness of space.  
“I bang them against the corners of the hospital rooms. It’s over how no one has ever loved me. My dad has never truly loved me. My mom is never to be seen, just constantly cleaning the house, my father never speaking a single word to her. And what says I’m not going to end up like her? Huh? Especially that a man like Jamie was the only man ever in my life who was good enough for me.”  
“And what are you trying to say?” He shoved the tray away from the table, creating a clatter and a bang as the dried up food landed on the floor, and the rest of the patients listened on to their conversation, as silence was as piercing as a needle in that moment.  
“So you want me to treat you like a princess.”  
“I crave love, Sonic. I crave it because I never had much of it ever since I was a child. I never had much love from my father, from my mother, from the other children, from my grandmothers and grandfathers and from doctors and teachers and people I barely know. Maybe if I had enough love, the sun would shine for me. The sun would make my black wrists light up with so much color and warmth that they’re pink again, like they used to be. The night only has so many stars, Sonic. The world only has so many people. And I wished I was as worshipped like those stars and people. Praised. That I’m a god among men.”  
“But I can’t give that to you! That’s impossible…”  
“But what you’re saying seems to be impossible too, Sonic. If the impossible can happen, then this can happen to me too. I want to be as worshipped as those skinny stick-thin people on TV and magazines and movies. I want people to be addicted to me, to relish their hate for me, but yet they can’t get enough of me. I want the world to burn without me, I want the sun to explode when I die from this Earth, I want to be so significant but yet so insignificant in this fucking world. I want to be in the stars and fucked.”  
“So you want to be a celebrity.”  
“Yes!”  
“You already are one in this hospital. We’re the only living people with a brain in this hospital. We’re as significant but yet so insignificant. The world would continue shining and spinning once we die though. No one will hear our obituaries. But that’s our life.”  
“And I don’t like it!”  
“Well you’ll have to get used to it sweetheart, because you’re going in the Chronics Ward in a week, and you’ll be there for years!”  
“Then I want to end my life!”  
“But you can’t!”  
“But I will!”

She grabbed a fork from the tray. She broke the plastic in half, and prepared to lay out red lines on her blackened wrists.  
The staff was watching from a distance, and with their long spindly white arms they grabbed Amy, they tried to get her to drop the plastic shards of the fork, they tried to put her in the Safety Room as both of her arms were pinioned, and she screamed, a scream that broke apart the sky and the stars and Sonic’s eardrum and the Black Beauty’s eyes and Sonic swore that the world was split in half that day, over the scream of one girl with the black wrists.

Silence.  
It cut through the air like a blade.

Dr. Robotnik assessed the situation and told them that Amy now had to be in the Chronics Ward, with his full care and attention given to her. But all Sonic knew was that her world was going to be as black as her wrists.

Even though the green beans were on the floor, he picked a few of them up and slowly chewed them, as he saw that the Black Beauty seemed to infect everyone in the hospital, and his tongue bled as it accidentally tasted a piece of plastic fork.

If only his tongue was taken away too.


	20. A Black Eye for a Black and White Mind

His bed was filled with the film of sticky sweat, as he thought of Amy, the latest prisoner of the Chronics Ward. The latest victim to be buried into the darkness, into the machines that glowed with a spectrum of vivid colors that are the only the source of light inside. For all Sonic knew, she was dead. She casted herself into the world of the buried, to live among the afterlife with Tails and Big, not knowing when she would be alive again, not knowing what the light in the world looked like, not knowing the fresh smell of sunlight as it would be casted down from the hospital windows, the chain-link steel cages behind them, locking them all inside. But Amy, Tails, and Big didn’t even had windows. They only had the Forgotten Children, the cicadas on the walls, the gargoyle door at the very end who didn’t believe in anything they had to say. The Chronics Ward was the edge of the world, the end of it, and he figured the last thing all humans would see before they died was total pitch black darkness as their souls were sucked out of their bodies and casted into the heavens or the hells. And Sonic sweat, stressed that he failed in protecting someone from their insanity, not being the catcher in the rye like he was supposed to be, and he listened on the calls of the crickets, their violin legs being rubbed against the backthroat of night, and he thought, and thought.

He could hear their sonata, ringing out into the far corners of the purple-tinted skies as the lights from the city lit it like a lighter, like flames. He could see the stars protruding out to him, ready to cut through his hand from the window. And he could see God’s other eye, the moon, as it watched him in his room, the hospital suddenly feeling as heated as a boiler room.

He had to get Amy out of there. He had to get herself back into the Acute Ward. She didn’t deserve what all the staff thought she deserved. She suffered through enough, with not knowing the love of her parents, the love of her boyfriend, Jamie, the love of swallowing food, the love of the world, but even Sonic didn’t had that.

He sat upright on his bed and blanketed his head with his hands. He wanted to save everyone in the hospital. He wanted to save Shadow, and he wanted to save himself. And he knew the hedgehog with the blood stripes would hate him for a moment, as he once again failed to have Amy in his army, he failed in protecting her, and now he had to go inside the Chronics Ward, have her believe everything he was saying, and letting her suffer while she was in his army, fraught with worry and fraught with the disease of anorexia, the disease of Borderline Personality Disorder. And Sonic sighed, and wrapped himself with the small pink blanket, and he watched as the glow of the moon dipped further into the sky, and the dusk was turned to dawn.

He watched as the stars were no longer blazed in the night sky, and were soon turned into cinders when the red ruby sun began to emerge from the fog. He knew that although Amy had suffered the fate, the curse of bad luck, he would see her again, inside the Chronics Ward, ready to be sent to the land of Dali. He was sure that now she knew what the Chronics Ward was really like, she would believe him. She would believe every last word that fell from his cindered tongue. And he wondered if she would believe in Shadow’s bloody tongue as well, telling her that she was one of them, another one suffering in the ward, another one who would soon die and be roasted away in the machine, it purring for Tails to feed it more, to not starve it any longer of the hapless victims.

He wondered if any of the other staff had ever seen the Chronics Ward with their own fastened eyes. Would they be able to see how dark it was, the insects crawling on the walls, the children who cried everyday? Probably if one found out about it, Dr. Robotnik would fire him and not even give them their meager paycheck. He wondered if they could hear from the walls in the Acute Ward, hearing the laughter of Tails as his insomnia drove him to exhaustion and insanity. Poor little Tails. Poor little Amy Rose. If only her father truly loved her. If only Tails’ father wasn’t a dead head Fred. If only they could both use a dab of superglue, one to fasten the heart to Amy’s dad, and one to fasten Tails’ father’s head. If there was nothing duct tape and superglue couldn’t fix, there was God. But God was on vacation, turning his answering machine off, because he had enough of Sonic’s parents praying to him everyday and asking if they were doing good enough deeds to get to heaven. And God would simply say, “keep up the good work,” and nothing more. He had a lot of other things to do than to listen to them, but like the machine Tails’ kept up, they called every two hours. And they wouldn’t leave Him alone.

And that was why Sonic was cursed. Because God had enough of his parents calling His household everyday, asking where Jesus was at, because their son was in the hospital, using up their money, and he needed guidance. And Jesus said he was busy, he was off the coast of Africa, helping children who needed more than Sonic ever could need.

“But tell him that we miss him and we want him to return home as soon as possible! And that he’ll start believing in you soon.”  
“You can’t force religion on him, Ms. Seabrooks,” said Jesus. “He’s going to be a fucked up kid if you do.”  
But yet they didn’t listen to their Lord and savior. They only hung up, and called again another two hours. Jesus was even fed up with them, and he was supposed to be a forgiving, kind alter ego of God.

The morning sun soon encompassed all the bluebells and the daffodils, and the blushing leaves scattered around the trees. The air was a stifle colder, which meant the hospital would be even colder. Autumn was approaching fast, and Sonic knew time was running quicker here. He thought it was merely just summer a few days ago, and he spent his vacation from school in here. And he could type up a report called, “My Summer Vacation at the Sanitarium, By Sonic Thaddeus Seabrooks, age 18.” And it would only get a C. He knew how his grades always were at school. He barely put in the effort in any of his assignments, and he often got Cs and Ds. The only class he did well in was Gym, simply because the steel mill and running a mile everyday kept him fit, but even if he said he wanted to be an athlete, he never really considered that seriously. He was lean and quick, but not particularly strong. And he often ran when the sun hid away in the daybreak of dawn. When no one could tell him how quick he was. Only his coach knew, but he was probably dead by now by smoking too many cigarettes.

And then it was breakfast time, where they were served yet more slop. Turkey bacon (where it tasted too burnt) and scrambled eggs that looked too white and puffy to be eggs, along with orange juice and a small cup of cereal. The only taste that was salvageable was the cereal, simply because it wasn’t manufactured at the hospital. He didn’t even eat the rest of his eggs. Nack however seemed to enjoy them, and as he sneaked his tray away from the table, he added the remaining fluffy clouds to his, and Nack ate with much relish. He wondered why he ate everything he was served. Maybe because he was served much worse food in the past, or he simply never had a lot of food to eat before he went to the hospital. After breakfast they went into group, where most of the patients were silent, thinking too much of what happened to Amy. He noticed Knuckles’ head was drooping low while they talked about everyone else’s problems, as if the floor was a great interest to him, as if he tried to solve the puzzle of the tiles like a Sudoku problem.

“Knuckles, is there anything you want to say? You seem down lately.”  
“Not that I know of,” he said, as he continued to solve the mystery of where the 9 would go in one square. “Just what you did to Amy was not right. She’s in there with the Chronics, talking to some patient who can’t even say one intelligible word. You know she doesn’t belong in there.”  
“We had to do what we thought was right for Amy. She’s been in a very depressed mood for over two years now, and only Dr. Splinter and Robotnik can solve that by putting her in a closely observed area. If she starts to improve a little we’ll let her back in the Acute Ward, but she’s in there for her safety.”  
“In there for her safety my ass,” Knuckles muttered.  
“What did you say, Knuckleboy? Do you think you can do better than our job, dealing with all these dying patients, dealing with the lot of you (especially your temper problems knucklehead), and coming back home to two kids who are 18 years old but yet while their bodies are young they won’t get a job and work as hard as I do everyday?”  
There was silence in the room. No one said a word, not even a cough or sneeze.  
“I thought so.”

But Sonic was simply thinking to himself Of course we can, we’re taking care of so many sick patients who need to go home along with a lot of children without a mom and dad. And I deal with my 30 year old parents who constantly tell me I’m wrong. Of course we can do better than you. Just watch us.

And after group, they were free to do whatever activities were allotted in the ward. Nack listened to his rock station, Bark and Bean watched Bill O’Reilly asking what was wrong with America (a question that’s been asked since America was independent) and Blaze rubbed her fingers on the green leather chair again, without Amy writing or coloring. The absence of her left a great big void that wished to suck in the rest of the patients, a void that wanted more and needed more, and wished to be as great as a celebrity as Amy was, back in the Chronics Ward.

Voids always wanted to be more noticed than the things that were filled up. That was what voids did best. And Sonic always noticed them, always noticed the gaping mouths that wanted to devour him too.

He gathered up Knuckles and Ambra to his room, as the sunlight reflected off the window, creating a shattered mix of light and shadow. He watched as more leaves fell from the trees, becoming naked as the colder months began to emerge, and the trees no longer needed their clothes, not in this cold bitter winter that was coming ahead. Their limbs shall stretch towards the sky and try to touch all the clouds and the silver sun, and they would wish they had their clothes and friends back after Christmas. It was guaranteed.

“Amy is in the Chronics Ward now. I’m sure once we meet her, she would believe in our story that Wonderland has a secret inside here. That the Chronics Ward was everything I described, and the staff doesn’t know anything. They simply want her to rot and suffer, without knowing the truth of what that ward really is. And I’m scared that soon one of us would be in the worst ward, the Disturbed Ward. I could feel it. Maybe you’d be in there someday Knuckles.”  
“What? Me? No way. You can only get in there if you attack the staff or someone else. I never did that, and I don’t think I ever will. I may have a temper, but I never got it to go that far.”  
“I was afraid Amy would end up in the Disturbed Ward actually, but I guess you’re lucky that she was sent to the Chronics and now she would believe in what you said. It’s hard in there, but they said they would let her out if she behaved. Then she better behave, otherwise she’ll be stuck in there with Big and Tails for many years, and it’s absolutely torture.”

He watched as the nurse’s heels clicked and clucked against the floor, wheeling yet another patient who was from the Disturbed Ward. He was drooling now, and his left eye socket appeared to be bruised and punctured. Yet another lobotomy. Despite being proven that they didn’t work, Dr. Splinter still did them, and only his patients would suffer. He groaned and couldn’t form anything intelligible, as he shat and pissed himself and would have to be fed with the help of the staff, while the food would literally melt away from his mouth. They were only infants when they were lobotomized, mindless and unknowing. They could only cry and piss themselves. A life full of painful tragedy caused by the mental illness, only to grow worse by having a stake driven to your brain and making you into a drooling limp meatbag. Sonic thought if they ever made him that way, he could only wish that someone would kill him, in mercy.

“That was Mr. Lipsko. He suffered through depression and he was lobotomized. Christ, Splinter is really choosing his patients to drop like flies, to make room for new ones to put in the incinerator.”  
“And we’re going to be next, aren’t we?”  
“If we don’t hurry up and kill Splinter in Dali, if we continue to waste our time in this room!” Sonic shouted, the vision of the cradling, blood-stained knife making him irritable. It always made him irritable. Especially when the Black Beauty could decide to strike, at any time.  
And without saying another word more, they went inside the Chronic Ward, planting themselves into the hole of the hospital, inside the black void that Amy had created in the Acute Ward, seeing the small pink hedgehog resting on one of the hospital beds, her face appearing to be tear stricken as the children with their violet eyes continued to gather around her, peeping curiously, wondering who this new person who just entered in their foster homes.

Sonic could only gather them in his great big arms as they were spread over them like wings, and he said to them, “This is Amy Rose, and she’s hurt very bad. Please give her a lot of respect. She needs it. If you want, you can treat her like she’s the princess. I’m sure she would treat you with a lot of respect too. Women generally do.”

The children looked at his face, his face that usually was maniacal, twisted and contorted, and confused as the world swirled around him like a merry-go-round, but now he had a face that nearly shone in the darkness, with his warm smile and his warm eyes. The children thought of him as their father, and it was true, because he had the face of the father, and he had the singing voice of a father, as he huddled them together, and sang them a song that he heard a while ago, to get them to calm down.

Blackbird singing at the dead of night  
Take these broken wings and learn to fly  
All your life  
You were only waiting, for this moment to arise  
Blackbird fly, Blackbird fly  
Into the light of the dark black night

Knuckles never thought before that Sonic had a nice voice as he crooned them a simple lullaby, swaying them gently and making their eyelids heavy and moist. It wasn’t long before they requested to sleep in their small little beds, and Sonic tucked them all in, tightly and with great care and warmth.

Sonic still wasn’t sure what prompted him to take care of all the children as if they were his own. Even if his mother always told him that she would like grandchildren someday, he couldn’t imagine having a child. He knew if he couldn’t take care of himself, then he couldn’t take care of someone that was his own flesh and blood. But yet all these children loved him as if Sonic really was their father, and they gave him a small kiss before they were sent off to the world of dreams, the world of security and peace, a world that wasn’t like this ward. A world where they went back to their real parents and had the freedom of childhood, just for a little while.

And as he returned to Amy’s room, he began to sing again, as she rose from her slumber, wondering who had the voice that calmly sent her to an even more peaceful sleep, away from this hell that was known as the Chronics Ward.

Blackbird singing at the dead of night  
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see  
All your life  
You were only waiting, for this moment to be free  
Blackbird fly, Blackbird fly  
Into the light of the dark black night

Amy’s green eyes warily looked into the singer’s face, the singer that had the voice of smooth velvet, and he also had green eyes, and blue fur and the distant reminder that the Black Beauty would attack any single moment, with her knife that was neatly tucked away, into her shoulder bag that contained so many dark secrets of the world that she wished to share. He thought he could see her reddened eyes, dry with the lack of sleep, and he continued to glance at the wall, to see if he could see the silver glint of her knife, but there was no white spark in the black chasm. Only red eyes, and ones that were green, as she continued to gaze up at him, and she sighed.

“It’s you Sonic. I thought I would see you here, and I wanted to apologize for earlier. Turns out even though this world would only be dreamed up by a lunatic…you were right. You were right about this world existing. I can clearly see the cicadas on the walls, the children you just put to sleep, and the other two Chronics, Big and Tails…though Tails is asleep right now, he’s about to feed the machine again in one hour. The machine burns up all the patients that are of no use to the doctor anymore, and I can see in Tails’ movements, his eyes, his face, that he’s dead inside. That he’s been doing this for a long time now, and that he has seen so many dead faces that he only became numb to it, that he could only sniff blood for so long that his nostrils are used to it, the stench of death and the stench of rotting in the flames. And to think that he’s only six years old…” She shook her head, sorrowful, glancing at the cicada’s silk woven walls, and she thought that these cicadas might’ve been a different subspecies, ones that could spin web from their bodies like spiders that could weave out stories with their cloth-making hands. It did look like sperm on the wall, stained and faded, but she couldn’t think of how this hospital was home to so many insects, though she didn’t doubt that even the Acute Ward would be infested with cockroaches, crawling in their food and even crawling in their milk with their amber bodies, their hissing screeching tongues drying out in a few sections of the hospital, in the walls and in the crevices.

Sonic stopped his singing, as he could hear the cicada’s own tongues singing into the night. These cicadas were influenced by the moon, as the silver shards pumped their blood, and made their shells shine as they shed it. He simply lowered his head and he reached out a hand to the pink hedgehog, his green eyes once again sparking in the darkness like malachite, and he said, “We have a mission to finish today, Amy. We have to go to the land of Dali and to see if we can defeat the King of Spades. With his metallic hearts and his metallic clubs, we will have to stop him at all costs, but I can tell in your heart that you have the power to defeat him, and if we can combine all our hearts together, our hearts woven of flesh and blood and vessels and muscle, I know we can defeat him. I know we can put his cold mind and body to rest, with his plans to lobotomize us all in this damned hospital, with his pickax ready to chop all of our heads, but even if he’s ready to chop my own, I won’t bow down to him, I won’t give up the fight. In the end, truly, Amy, it isn’t about who’s wrong or who’s right anymore. It’s about having these patients taken to safety, to live on in their bell jars, to no longer be in a world that’s corroded with green metal and that barely allows their ash and dust to breathe. I can see the room in which they have them in this hospital, their ashes in shelves shelves of ones who used to be flesh and blood until they were oxidized down, and I know they need to be in homes, to be with their families who expected them to come out of this hospital right and healthy. Will you join me in this journey Amy, to make those children have homes, to allow ourselves to smile and laugh again, to allow Big to go fishing, to allow Tails to have a restful night sleep, to allow you to have a full stomach, to allow Knuckles to see his own family again, to allow me to have a mind that’s no longer polarized? It’s your choice, but I think you need to be with us, otherwise you’ll be stuck in this hospital, and we will no longer rest a restful sleep, and we will only be in Dr. Splinter’s red, watchful eyes, like Big Brother in so many years past that were supposed to be so far in the future. It’s your call: which side do you want to be on? Ours, or his?”

She took his hand, gripping it tightly with her own that ached and were so tired after stressing so much on what was going to happen to her in this section of the ward, that were tired after scratching her body a little for the sorrow she felt in her soul, and she said, “Of course I’ll be with you, Sonic. I want to be healed. I want to be cured. I no longer want to worry. I no longer want my soul to grow worse. I want to be in a place that feels safe, and I know that this isn’t the place at all to feel that way. I never felt that way with a doctor that’s as evil as Dr. Splinter, I always knew he had some sort of agenda inside here, and even when I saw him I knew I wasn’t going to be in a helpful hospital, only one that would fill me up with fear, with decay. I’m not sure exactly what this Dali world is supposed to be, but I’ll go with you, to help my soul that is aching and in pain as much as my blackened charcoal wrists are.”

He looked at her wrists again. They were still bloodied and bruised, that much he could tell in the darkness, in the glint of the children’s violet eyes. They could sink into the darkness of the entire ward, as they seemed to match the stars and the galaxies of the night, with the small purple bruises that were supposed to be milky ways, and the black cancerous-looking dots that were gray that were supposed to be black holes. Inside of Amy’s wrists were another space, another time, as her heart continued to beat along with Sonic’s, as they thump thump thump inside the Chronic Ward, and they thought together of going inside the other world, the other galaxy that Amy couldn’t capture in the sheen of her arms.

They continued to beat onward, her heart’s and Sonic’s, and he could feel the violet-eyed children coming alive, as he sang yet more of the tune that livened the corridors, that woke Tails from his sleep, that made him wonder what made him awake for his two hour nap he had to take every time the monster machine wanted him to feed him.

He could hear it ringing into his ears, the calls of the forgotten, the calls of the lost, the calls of the dead…

Blackbird fly…  
Blackbird fly…  
Into the light of the dark black night…

And in a flash, in a white flicker of light, in the whirling dust of the dove’s wings that shone like the stars, they could see an array of colors in the sky, mostly dark blue and a tinge of pink like a medium rare steak, as they looked at the withered, beaten down trees whose veins at the end of their thin limbs reached out for them hungrily, carrying on their wrists melted clocks, melted clocks whose times were forever bound to be meaningless, because they were wasted, on what seemed to be nothing. On war? On simple meaninglessness we all use our time for? He didn’t know. All he knew was that time was dead, and it lied in the desert sand, waiting to be sucked up, waiting for the rain to wash them away.

He could see a raven pecking at the dirt that contained no plant life, not a single source of measly worms that were crawling through the dirt looking for salvation in the moist crevices, and the bird looked starved, famished, as it gazed at the passerby’s eyes with its silver rimmed eyes and wondered if they had food to spare. And that the rotting flesh off the pink hedgehog’s wrists looked delicious, enough to rip off and devour with great glee.

As they walked on by in the desert, the crow flew away with the flap of its metallic black fingers, and they could see in the distance of very tall elephants, ones with stark, wooden legs, skimming through the skylight as if dipping their elastic, fine legs into water and carrying it over the murk. Sonic felt that if he could touch the sky, it would be immersed in water, as he could see fish swimming in the clouds, and swimming in the moon, with human heads and human eyes but yet retain the lips that fishes puckered when they were on the surface, and he could see a great canyon, and what seemed to be a black and white checkerboard becoming the drapes of the cliff, as eggs were risen to the air to hatch and to become flowers that would seep from the blood red yolk. He saw so many strange things in this world, a very absurdist world to breathe the same air as the inhabitants, as he looked over at the melting clocks, whom continued to tick and spat with their gears and numbers and seconds and minutes, with their two hands dripping into the face, with his face glistening before him, like a mirrored reflection. He could see the world had a moon as he looked beyond the horizon, a white silvered moon that had a black slit eye, looking over the people who entered, wondering where they would be going, and it knew instantly that they would be going into the King of Spades’ lair, and it could only blink, and Sonic thought he could see the white milky tongue of clouds erupt from its lips and back into its fanged mouth again, grinning wickedly.

“Sonic…I’m not sure what world you’re showing me here. This seems to be…bizarre to say the least. You can’t be taking me to a world that’s as unsafe as this one, where literally everything oozes of evil, you can’t possibly be…”  
Sonic could only shake his head, and he gripped her hand firmly. “You wanted to see the King of Spades and defeat him and get out of this hospital, right? Then that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to kill him, and we’re going to get out of here. You either stay here with us, or you go back to the Chronics Ward with all that darkness and with nothing to do but suffer from your insanity. It’s your choice.”

Freedom by transversing through a very strange land that could possibly kill her, or be bored and soon die in the hospital many years later. She knew even if she didn’t like the strange and the new, she had to keep pressing forward. She couldn’t imagine being in her room and in the white pillowed Safety Rooms that had faulty lighting and bloodstains on the walls. Even if she never was so interested in Sonic, especially not before when she first met him, she took his hand, as the others followed behind, listening in onto the sounds of the ticking clocks, into the fish that swam and swished their tails into the streams up in the sky, of the snake that took over the sky with its thin reptilian lips and continued to smile, with its fangs baring, ready to devour a fish whole into its gullet, as the fish would scream with its manlike voice and lungs.

He thought to himself as they walked through the desert land. He never was interested in Amy physically, and he wasn’t sure if he was even interested in her romantically, especially that he still had a girlfriend that was now outside of this hospital, in the Texas heat and the Texas Republican views that she still upheld, and he wondered if he could eventually dump her and marry another girl, someone who he thought could actually understand him, but he knew Amy was far from that. She couldn’t even understand herself, as much as she wanted to. She continued to pick through her nails, sharpening them to be used against her skin, and he could still see the galaxies in Amy’s wrists, a reminder that he should never get a girl who could do as much damage to his own flesh and bones. Especially if he ever said anything to piss her off. Sonic knew it wouldn’t be right for him to defend himself, simply because she was a woman.

And he wondered if Knuckles or any other guy friend he ever had would call him a “pussy” for that. That he had no spleen, no toughness in his body, simply because he thought it was wrong to strike back at a woman. He tried to keep those thoughts buried to himself ever since he used to be with Josephine, when she would tell him the doctrines of his actions and of the willingness of his faith to allow God to heal him, but he knew that God was still taking a vacation, and He wasn’t going to be back for a while, not until His son’s alleged birthday came around.

As he thought on these thoughts, his ears pricked up, pointed, listening to the ticking of the melting clocks, but he thought he could hear something else in the quiet world. He thought he could also see the snakemoon hiss and engulf a fish, he thought he could see the waterfall in the sky arising, cascading and having the fish touch the ground as they leaped through the air, before stirring back into the water, sucking in all the hydrogen their human-made lungs breathed in, and he listened in on the swans that were flying above the skystream, with their long necks looking more like the trunks of elephants, as their wings covered their bodies, the ear flaps of elephants, drooping low to the water in the sky, as they honked and hollered and swam with the fishes with the heavy thudding of their feet echoed into the land, the land of the elephants in the reflection of the swans.

But other than that, they heard nothing. He thought he could hear a scream, as if they were becoming closer and closer to Dr. Splinter’s kingdom, but there was only the world’s breathings, as its lungs filled in with air and noise and filtering with the sense and the nonsense, and there was nothing else, just the fantasy absurdist world breathing and talking through clenched teeth.

The swans careened their necks to the fishes in the skystream, thinking as much as Sonic, as their reflection revealed their white feathers to have gray wrinkled sagging skin, and they honked, and they hissed at the snakemoon, as it revealed its fangs that were like the crescent moon, as it attacked it, and the moon was only half-lit, as the sky turned to evening, as the fishes continued to swim through the stars and the milky ways, as they continued to drift through the waterfalls and nearly kiss the land.

Time seemed to be going so much faster in this world. As if it was literally melting into the Earth and into the desert sand.

The barebacked trees still looked to him, with their arms stretched, their veins to his beating heart, with their clocks slung on their shoulders, wanting him to take one, to know the time of the fast-paced world, the world that is on fire and melting and burning and corroding, and he hesitated before he began to touch one of them, the metal still feeling hot as he wore it on his shoulder like the trees, and he could hear the seconds and minutes ticking as he stood there, as he felt the clock’s numbers peeling away and falling more into an abysmal liquid decay, but he thought maybe in this world, the clocks and trees and the absurdist fantasy land were all telling him something, that their hands were pointing to where possibly the King of Spades lived in his wonderful, far-off kingdom, and the trees even pointed, and even the swan’s wings pointed to the direction of the madman’s palace, and he watched as all the others shared confused and perplexed looks on their faces as he carried the dripping clock, the metal feeling less solid as he took each step, and they followed him along, as they could hear the crows with fingers for wings flying in the air, waiting for them to drop dead in the desert heat, with the yellows of their beaks always prominent in the distance, no matter how much the air swiveled and melted, just like the clocks.

They were thirsty, and they sweat gallons of pearls down their backs and brows. They wished they could fly into the air to swim in the stream where the fishes lied quietly into the sky, as the snake’s fangs were still flashed across the royal blue skin of the sea. The clock that Sonic carried was more loose, more heated, like an electric blanket on a scorching hot Texas day, and he knew even if he wanted to, he couldn’t let it go, he couldn’t let it melt into the grooves of the ground, as it held secrets to the kingdom. But there were so many other clocks to collect, that melted and swung on the trees like fruit or tire swings for the children, and Tails’ feet were becoming slower as they walked, panting like a dog playing a fierce game of catch in the Mojave Desert, and he wished they could stop, and he wanted to rest until it rained, but he knew if he complained, everyone would leave him alone, tell him that the kingdom was only a little bit further, and he should stop complaining. That was all how they treated Miles. No one ever treated him right ever since his father became a dead head Fred. No one ever saw him as a good friend, especially since the only people in the world who ever treated him kindly were gone, except for Sonic, who only carried the steaming clock on his back, sweating more peals and beads of sweat than anyone else who walked among the land, and even if he wanted to stop, he knew he couldn’t, and Tails had to follow him in his footsteps. Everyone did. Even if Amy’s feet were sore and even if Knuckles wished he could get a tall glass of water, even if Big wished to fish for the carp in the sky, even if Ambra wished she could move into a room with ample air conditioning. But he knew they all wanted the same thing, to be cool, and they wished the kingdom was an advanced kingdom with cool air. The crows stretched their hands on the naked trees that were looking more like naked women, with their bony backs dried up in the sun, scorched, burnt. 

He could imagine himself inside a boiled pot of soup, some Campbell’s chicken noodle that had the yellow skin for liquid that looked nearly reminiscent of piss. He imagined all of them cooking, with the King of Spades hungry like the snake in the sky, ready to devour them whole. He couldn’t see the kingdom anywhere he looked, but he could see the upside down world as strange as it was, with the crows, clocks, elephants, swans, fish, and the snake continued to rattle its rattle like a bored infant, its tongue slithering and cutting across the arid heat, its slit eyes becoming the sun with the rubied gem in the middle that was a blade. And he was surprised, other than the clock’s ticking and the fish swimming, on how quiet it was. That there were no creatures that wanted to attack them and fight them for their flesh and blood, that there was no one inside this desert landscape that wanted to kill them, except for the King of Spades, as the flower bloomed inside the egg, as he could see further into the distance that Narcissus was being born, that the King of Spades’ ego was being well-fed through their suffering, and that he was ready, anytime, to fight them.

And they continued to drag on through the heat, wondering when it would rain, when the drops of the stream would reach out and cool the land and give life to the Narcissus plants.

 

—

 

The air continued to melt around them, like the clocks. Sonic was holding onto a clock that became his cloak, as he continued to heave and sweat and demand for water and cool air, as the clock’s hands continued to drip and wither away in this world that was supposed to be a nuclear wasteland. He could see the palace up ahead, the black and white patterned arches that overshadowed them, the tall spade that was reaching into the sky so much that it touched the stream and the fishes had to avoid it, and the entire palace seemed to be made of pearls and marbles, as white and blinding as it was, much like it was the second sun in this world. He thought he could hear the King of Spades’ laughter become all the more louder, more wicked with each passing minute as the clocks continued to drip and rot away, and everyone had a deep fear in their hearts as the shadow became larger, all the more ready to swallow them with its massiveness, and Sonic thought he never saw a kingdom that was large as this one, as the King of Spades could make his kingdom as large as he pleased, because he thought he was god of his world, in a reality he didn’t even deserve to take credit from the people he murdered.

They felt like amoebas compared to the massive size of the doors as they tried to open them, and they couldn’t find it in their strength to open them, as their bodies were too exhausted to use their strength in the dried up heat. Sonic panted, his tongue rolling away from his mouth, as saliva and spit dripped from his jaws, and no matter how strong Shadow told him he was, he couldn’t open the doors, ones that looked like they were fit for the biggest gods in the world, God Himself, who was taking a vacation, possibly in Dr. Splinter’s lair, who didn’t want to hear any more prayers about Sonic, that He heard enough from that blue bastard, that he cut off his phone lines and locked the doors because he didn’t even want to see his face as his parents continued to shove the photo of him, saying that He had to pray for him, because he was a lost lonely boy in need of guidance, who needed to kill a well-respected man in order to escape through Hell. 

Sonic could hear laughter creeping through his skull. He could hear the sadistic chuckling of the man that trapped him inside the dirty dark green and white walls and the wire-encased windows, and he smiled like a harlequin when he murdered a baby boy and ate his body, his teeth full of red flesh, and with the slight snap of his fingers, the door opened, the large doors ornate with the eyes of men fish who had gemmed eyes and the teeth and skulls of gargoyles, and with yet more dark insane laughter he let them in, with his long black skinny and needle-like fingers that shined like the galaxy’s jewels as he rubbed his hands together and expected to see them, waiting to devour their bones, their eyes, and their skulls much like he did with anyone else who challenged him.

And he spoke.

“Are you hot? Thirsty? I certainly don’t want my dear guests to die from the desert heat when they’re meeting the great and wonderful King of Spades. I will turn on my great A/C that functions on people’s souls, and I will turn on the drinking fountains that are like their namesakes, fountains for you to play in and pinch your pennies inside the streams. I’ll be waiting for you inside this royal red room, Sonic Thaddeus Seabrooks, and you better not disappoint me!”

His voice sounded like thick nails when inserted in the skin of a fearful, paranoid man. He could see in one of the halls of the great palace, that was as red as the blood on the patient’s dying hands as they created this world, there was an innocent fountain, one made with marble cherubs spitting out and urinating the clear stream of water, and he could feel the cool air being blasted in his face, a complete comfort from the heat. Before he could warn if the fountain was a trap, both Big and Tails ran to it, their throats parched with sand, as they splashed inside and began to wash themselves of the cherub’s pure holy spit. He wondered if the King of Spades really was planning to kill them there, with a trick that somehow the cherubs would begin to spill acid and sear through their skin, but he waited as the minutes passed as they sat in the water, collecting and counting the pennies that were immersed in the stream. And even if he wanted to call Tails back and tell them that it was all a trick as much as his cracked voice wished to speak, there was no threat. None at all when suddenly Knuckles and Amy and Ambra began to dance in the water, drinking it in big gulps as their hands gathered it and they let it move coolly in their throats, curing their hot and irritated esophagus’s from what now seemed to be so long ago.

And Sonic stayed put, wondering what was his agenda, for making an innocent fountain for his friends, and even if it was harmless, he still couldn’t let himself dive into. He felt like he would give into his generosity, something he wished to never feel towards this cruel, flame-spitting, arrow-tailed man who carried a pitchfork and had wings that stretched along the desert horizon.

The king chuckled again, as he extended one long claw towards him that Sonic could feel even if he couldn’t see it, and he said, “Don’t worry Mr. Seabrooks, there’s nothing to fear in my fountain. There are no tricks and no death traps of any kind. You have the king’s word. Drink up as much as you want, I swear there will be no pain to drench your thirst.”  
Sonic was silent, still unsure of what to think of the situation. He waited a few more minutes to see if the king would suddenly betray them and kill them and shower the fountain with red blood, but yet there was still nothing. Amy still sat put, as the others got out of the innocuous fountain, and found themselves of not suffering from one cut or scratch or burn. Sonic knew of all of these tricks from watching all these movies, reading all these books, of where the cruel bad guy would give the hero a drink before he did something awful to him or it was poisoned or it somehow had a terrible effect on him in the next battle. He was cautious, but he knew nothing he could’ve said to them would’ve stopped them from the fountain, but both of the hedgehogs knew they couldn’t trust the King of Spades, especially when he had an odd inkling that the entire room he was in was alive, as the walls were made of flesh, as the palace had eyes, as it smiled as Sonic continued to stroll down the hallway, waiting to see the King of Spades ready to fight him in this great battle that he knew he would have to be merciless in, to kill the man that trapped them inside the wretched building for what seems to be many numb months and years. He expected yet more tricks as he traversed down it, hearing the palace breathe with its lungs that were hidden inside, as he could hear its heart and his own beat in unison, pumping so much blood in his veins that he expected to find the godawful man in an instant, ready to stab him in the chest and make his heart halt all the beatings inside. Thump thump thump thump thump thump thump thump thump thump thump.

Tails extended a hand towards the hedgehog that was growing smaller and smaller by the second, but even if he could fit in the palm of his hand, he couldn’t take him away from the devils and demons. He had to fight this battle himself, the newly endowed father had to run to defeat his own monsters in the closet and under his bed, and no matter how small Tails’ voice was, he wasn’t going to stop.

If only life was like that little fox. If only.  
He wished it was.

He could hear his black laughter echoing down the halls, his wretched teeth shining for him a ruby glare as he opened the royal room door with his outstretched hands and saw the king, sitting patiently in his chair, with his long black claws and his piercing eyes that he had to admit instilled fear, with his skin that was as black as the night, with his teeth that reeked of rotting flesh and his horns that curled at the back of his head that seemed like they were close to stabbing his neck.

And before any of his other friends could come in through the door, with one flick of his scorched fingers he closed and shut it and locked it, with a lock that was made with the teeth of a patient from long ago.

His royal room was filled from top to bottom of his treasures, things he thought he would carry mementos of his patients. There were lamps that had shades that were the outstretched flesh of one patient who had a tattoo of a mermaid; the floor was made with the blood and vessels from the patients’ tongues, wet and coating Sonic’s shoes with a black stain of blood. There were photos that were colorful and black and white of various patients he treated, with obituaries of their deaths stamped and pasted to the walls as more blood and flesh seeped inside them, marking all of their deaths with a red marker. April 17th, 1962. March 20th, 1984. February 10th, 2002. December 21st, 1978. All the dates were marked with a highlighter, or circled with a red pen, as he could see their eyes moving around to see their own deaths marked in the newspapers, as they groaned and cried and stretched their elastic skin towards him, as they wished for him to take them away from this godawful hellish nightmare and back into the safe ward, where none of this existed, where they were just simply patients being treated for depression or bipolar or schizophrenia or anxiety disorders, and the King of Spades laughed with his heinous claws and teeth showing, as Sonic tried to stand up straight, as he tried to keep his composure of being in this room made from Satan’s mind, as he looked at him inside the black pits of his eyes and firmly stated, with no shaking in his voice, “You’re a godawful fucking human being, and you deserve to die for what you’re doing to these patients. And I will try to end your life, right now.”

“You can’t, Sonic,” he said, with a smile. “I know you won’t. Because as you can see, I am god in my own little world, and you can’t stop me. You will never be able to stop me. I can see in the future, and I can see that you will lose this fight, and you will only go back to the ward, with me keeping one of your fangs as a keepsake, a souvenir from our battle. However Mr. Seabrooks, I can also see that you will survive this battle, because I will have to admit that you have great abilities, some that you barely know of yourself, and you seem to underestimate your powers. While I cannot necessarily guarantee your success in this battle, as I can see you are going to struggle like a fish on land until you suffocate and curl up into a decrepit little ball and rot away. Gods can sense everything in the world, even the slightest twinge in the air, the slightest twitch in your body (and I can tell you’re shaking as you feasted your eyes on my treasures, my lovely treasures that I would never give away to anyone in the whole world), and even on who you are. Your name is Sonic Thaddeus Seabrooks, and you have a strict Catholic family who never seems to give you the freedom to do what you want in life. You’re thinking of becoming an athlete, but let’s be honest with yourself Sonic; you really don’t know what you’re doing in this vast, great big world out there…”

“That’s enough! I had it with you claiming that you’re a god and you can do all these things in Wonderland and that you can treat all your patients this way, like they’re commodities and not real people! I’m going to save all my friends in Wonderland, whether they consider me a friend or not, and I’ll let you know you’re nothing but a freaky doctor who is abusing his fame and fortune to create your own reality, because you can’t stand living in this one. You’re dead, Splinter! I’ll make sure you will suffer as much as your patients did when you put them through this pain and torture!”  
He smirked, his smile being as reflective as a crescent moon on placid black water. “An eye for an eye, huh? Remember Sonic, if you take out everyone’s eye for every deed that someone has committed, the world will go blind. And you too, will suffer in darkness as much as the blind are, because you don’t realize your sense of justice is hypocritical, especially for some of the lies you said, the acts you…”  
“Shut up already! Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

Sonic lunged towards the black demon, swinging his sword with all his might, expecting to slice through his scarred and decaying body, but when he opened his eyes, he disappeared. He could sense his breath, smelling like shit and coffee and torn tendons and veins and blood, and he grinned wickedly (Sonic could even sense him smiling behind him), as he laid one of his long, sharp fingers on him and he chuckled, his voice piercing his ears as he screamed, digging his fingernails into his arm. Black blood began to seep, and his voice was as loud and open as a great big black void, feeling a sharp sensation of pain, like a million long thick needles were being inserted inside him, as he could feel the blood and muscles and tendons unwinding and letting loose, and he wished the bastard would be stabbed by his sword already as he seemed to revel in his pain and loved to see the blood flow from his veins, and he tried to wretch himself free from his grasp, but the more he tried to escape and struggle, the more his needle fingers dug into his flesh, and the more his blood was being drained from his body.

Even if his foot was not as piercing and damaging as his sword, he lifted one of his feet and stomped on the claws of the King of Spades, and even if he was god, it was enough pain for him to flinch and let go of Sonic, as the blood dripped from his arm and he could feel it slowly decaying in his veins and arteries, and he wasn’t sure in how long he would be able to use it any longer. The King of Spades gave him a dead arm for wanting one of his eyes, and he lifted the sword and thrust it towards his black pupil-less holes, quicker than the speed of light could’ve reached in that dank prison that the King of Spades called his royal room, and the sword gushed blood from his socket, and the King of Spades did not scream or flinch or even move or blink (unlike when he stomped his foot, which was peculiar to Sonic when he thought about it in his tainted black memories) when he pulled out his obsidian eye, and in fact he smiled, and in fact he enjoyed it as Sonic felt his eyeball in the palm of his hand, rock-solid, much like an obsidian really was, as it sparkled in the white light that was reflected by the lamps that contained the flesh and marks of the dead patients.

And it felt cold. Colder than anything he ever touched before. He nearly thought it would freeze his hand if he grasped it any longer, until it soon warmed gradually as the seconds passed by. The King of Spades could only chortle, amused, as he could see worms crawling from the crevices of his eye.

“We had a deal Sonic. I’ll let you learn your own lesson while we fight. You can have my eye, as you’ve been looking forward to having as you discovered that I am a despicable man, one not worthy of living anymore. But I let myself live in this world, because I suffered too much from my sorrow, and the sorrows of everyone else who lived in this goddamned hospital, and everyone else in this entire goddamned world. I will let you have that eye as a souvenir, but I will take something of yours too. And I will give you my gift, the gift of insanity, and one of your fangs, so I can make some nice jewelry out of it. Hedgehog fangs, especially yours, are a very nice decoration, and I want to keep it as a memory of when you were still alive. Because with my godlike abilities, I can tell you’re going to die someday, by my own hands, and I want to remember you as the only patient who had the guts to say something about my practice.”  
"But even gods are flawed. My parents have been preaching to me about how God would save me and I’m as fucked up as ever. God will never save me. And you, even if you do say you’re a god, you will never kill me. Because I know you need me in this world. That’s how you came up with this royal room full of your treasures, isn’t it?”

Sonic stopped speaking, as his arm was beginning to feel numb, pinpricked, his fingers feeling as if they were going to rot off and he wouldn’t be able to hold his sword any longer. It was the King of Spades’ fingers, he knew, as literally just one touch of them meant death, and even in his smile that had so many maggots and worms crawling through his fangs Sonic so much wanted to slice him apart and stab him over and over until his body was entirely red instead of black, but his arms began to become paralyzed as if antifreeze was streaming through his muscles, and with one flicker and one blink and one tap, he could feel hot fiery pain seize him, he could feel his skin peeling off his bones, the skin turning red and his fur stained with blood as black as his eyes, and he wanted to close his eyes as much as the pain made him want to stretch them open for as long as he could, and he wished that this battle would be over, that this was all a dream, that the King of Spades never really existed and that this hospital never really existed and that his friends never really existed and that Shadow never really existed and that Smirk never really existed, and ultimately, that he himself, never existed. Never was given birth by the God that his parents loved so much and praised, even if he was currently on vacation.

His breathing became short, hurried rasps, his lungs felt like they were being crushed like the fragile little glass branches they were, and he could feel the fingers of small little daggers dipped with cyanide go inside his body, into his lungs, heart, brain, and he could feel him trying to search for something inside him, and he wished he would go away, he wished he would die at this instant, he wished that he had enough strength to torture the bastard and end his life for what he was doing to the patients and him, but he couldn’t even speak or even take one short breath without feeling like his bones and blood were being ground into dust.

The King of Spades smiled again, a twisted, dark smile, as he pulled something out of him, something that Sonic thought he couldn’t recognize from how blurry his vision was from the pain he was experiencing, feeling like he was going to fade into unconsciousness any moment now.

“With meeting me, and my world, I will take the one thing that’s important from you, the one thing that has kept you sane for so long. Love is such a deep emotion. It makes humans do unspeakable things, both good and evil. And with the flicker of my hand’s black flames, you will no longer love yourself. You will no longer love the person you were with, however much you actually did like her, your sweet dear honeyed Josephine. You will fall into a bitter madness, like I have felt in so long. You will never feel sanity and hope ever in your life. You will be much like Lord Byron, with both the gift of brilliance and the curse of insanity, insanity that will continue to eat at your bones for so long that you will grow weak and tired and the flames will only rise higher and higher, and with all your fervor, all your zest, you will only see the world in black and white, blue and gray, red and purple. You will be a damned soul like me, and I hope you don’t end up like I have, keeping all these souvenirs of the people you met, the illness that’s been making your brain black, the razor that sharpens your tongue and stabs anyone who dares get in the way of your passions. Sonic Thaddeus Seabrooks, I will make your bipolar worse, I will make it so that you are both delusional and dead but yet so alive and imbued with intelligence. You will become me!”

In an instant split second, Sonic could feel the searing pain as he ripped apart his heart’s chambers, and replaced them with ones that were faulty, ones that were made of glass, constantly zapped and warmed by electricity, that his heartbeats pumped mercury into his brain, that lead was what he constantly breathed and ate, that his brain began to blossom like a dead leaf from a tree in winter, turning from a vivid flame of color to something as soulless as a dry crusty brown color. The embers that were dying away and burning him out.

And soon in that instant, there was nothing. When he finally blinked, he felt no more pain, and the royal room with the organs and deaths and skins of the patients, the fountain that was supposedly harmless, the desert heat, the melting clocks, the snake fanged moon, the fish up in the sky in the stream, the crows that flew with fingers.  
They were all gone, and so was his fang as his tongue felt the gaping hole, and replaced with nothing but bland whiteness.

He could hear footsteps near him. Tiny, small footsteps, those belonging to a child. He could feel his voice opening his eyes as he whispered his name. “Sonic.”

Even if he wanted to sleep forever, he only asked, “Yes Tails?”

“We should go home now. Amy, Ambra, Knuckles, and Big are waiting for you. I think we’re done for today.”

He took a deep breath, as he picked himself up from the dirt of the white world. “Yeah. Let’s go. There’s nothing else better to do here now but…go back. Go back to the world that we could only wish to call home.”

Tails looked up at him with his innocuous blue eyes, and he held his hand tightly and said, “Then let’s go home. You’re tired. And I am too.”

He nodded, agreeing, as the small fox walked him back to the safety of his room in the psychiatric ward of Wonderland State, and he stared at the white ceiling, as he thought he could hear the fading footsteps of his friends, walking back to their rooms, to their respective wards.  
He blinked, and then turned in his bed, drifting off to sleep as he whispered the words, “If only life was like that. That we could rest whenever we wanted to. If only little fox. If only, little Tails.”


	21. The Death of a Razor, The Razor's Edge

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem used in this chapter, Edge, is written by Sylvia Plath and not me.

She was sitting in the round leather seat in her kitchen, rubbing her fingers against it, as if it would soon burst into a flicker of flame if she kept rubbing it rapidly between her fingertips, and soon this kitchen would be on fire, and she would have to forget about this whole ordeal. She was waiting on her brother to make something for her birthday. A nice little birthday cake, chocolate, with fudge icing and some candles to show how old she was. She was 16 now. A proud age to all American teenagers everywhere. It usually meant you could get a brand new car or you somehow inherited this sense of independence, that you were a little closer to being free from your parents’ roost, that the baby blue birds would soon fly and be able to see the world for themselves, and their momma bird could forget all about them.

She wished at this moment her brother would forget all about her. Forget that it was her birthday, forget that he was supposed to be her guardian after her mother died a few years ago, and she wished she still was under her mother’s wing, back when she didn’t puke words from her throat about how much of a piece of shit disgusting slut she was. Her mother used to be caring in those happy years, used to be careful about her health and used to praise Miss Blaze so much, that she took more of a liking to her than her brother, even if he was going to school to become a doctor, even if he claimed he was “busting his ass off” to support her and her mother, his head deep in textbooks, his eyes heavy in words and text, but his mouth was always heavy in hate and venom and spittle. Blaze has grown to be used to that mouth for a while, because she heard it inject his fangs into her for so many years that she grew used to the pain, that she even found some kind of high in it, the venom making her achieve some kind of adrenaline rush after it flowed deep within her, in her veins. And soon it was shed out, with her trusty razor blade that she kept hidden in the tool shed outside of the home, as if she was purifying herself.

The razor blade was rusty with the air inside the tool shed. But she knew no one would buy her any more. So even if it hurt so much, she always created the most jagged of lines, the most silent of screams, as the blood dripped down from her ankles and into her feet and socks, creating deep red little puddles that her brother would wash out, only thinking that his twisted little games made her feet bleed. The tool shed was the most private sanctuary she could afford at that time, as her brother rarely came in there, and it was the only place she could truly be herself. She could scream however loud she liked, she could write in her journal about how much she hated her brother, she could make herself bleed with her dusty old thawed out razor (as the ice is like sharp blades, as sharp as razors), and she could draw out her nightmares with long strokes of the pen, with the splash of watercolors and the bright hues of pastels. She drew her brother with these long dark hideous faces, that she soon blended fantasy with reality, and soon thought that was the face that her brother was secretly hiding deep within his skin, and she wished so much that she would never see it, but she also knew if she ever did see it, it would be a great relief to her that her brother was not a man, but secretly, a monster. And she would believe that. She would believe that even if her head was as rusted out as her razor blade, as the shovels and spades inside the tool shed.

She could hear the mixer turning on. With the loud yells of it mixing the fudge and cream and whatever else she thought belonged in a cake, she remembered of the games she and her brother played, which were never fun games, but long drawn-out horrific battles that she always had to use her brains to survive, lest her brother would get exactly what he wanted: to play out his sick little fantasies, and Blaze thought the worst thing she could ever see in a man was his cock.

She thought her brother was an amputee fetishist, as he always wanted to see her without an arm or leg, with the trusty saw that he stole from their father’s old tool shed, a little brown with the rusty air. Somehow, she would always get the phone and about to call 911. Her little fingers always reached 9, but never the 1s. Because she believed in her brother that foster homes were terrible places, that she would never find another mother or father to take care of her, that she was sick and broken beyond repair, a puppy that was ill, with its eyes nearly blinded by moistness, and his asshole wouldn’t work right. But he held the saw deftly in his hand, with a great big smirk on his face, waiting for her to get in the bathtub full of ice cubes, to freeze herself, to freeze her arm, and maybe her brother could donate the arm to someone who lost use of theirs, like some kind of Frankenstein. Her brother was exactly like Dr. Frankenstein, bringing these undead patients to life with bolts and electricity and stealing the organs of everyone else. Her arm was going to go to a dead man. A new being brought to life with the miracle of science. And she wished he would bring back her mother, so they could live in a better place than here with him, even if she was alcoholic.

“Give me your leg you little bitch! Give me your fucking leg! You’ve been a very bad girl, a very bad girl, and you deserve to lose your leg! You’re in the same league as those people who lost their arms and legs in the wars, and they were stupid enough to give their souls to the government anyways! Give me your arm, your leg, you little bitch! You little bitch!”

That was her brother’s endearing nickname for her. His little bitch. And although her heart was filled with fear, she was also growing tired of this game, as they nearly had it every other week, and Blaze thought this might be the time she would fight back, as much as her weak little bitchy arms and legs would allow. Her brother was nothing more but a bookworm, only textbook smart, there was a way to kill him and save herself, even if she had to go to a foster home. She kept the rusty weapon of hers safe and sound in her pockets, waiting for the right moment to strike, to tear off her brother’s face until she saw nothing but bloody jaws and bone and teeth, with his tongue still stuck in his fangs, able to shriek out to her “you little bitch” before she could gnash in his eyes, slish and slash through his throat and ears and cheeks, immediately changing who truly was the “little bitch”. Her brother certainly was. She wanted to hear him as she would cut and crit and clang his body before he would squeal like a pig, before she could sell his meat to the slaughter for Farmer John and serve a nice meal of porkchops for a nice caring American family like they used to be. Slowly, her brother was making her into an even darker person, an ailing person, who wanted to kill the people she hated and the people who have always wronged her. But try as she might, she never had the guts to hurt anyone. But today, she knew she would hurt someone. She knew she would hurt her brother, she would kill him, she would exact revenge on all the abuse he gave her throughout all these years, and she was ready, she was ready to carve him apart like a nice piece of woodwork, making engravings nice and neat for the rich and fancy people to see with their own blind eyes and buy it and be proud of their new furniture. Maybe he was a fetishist for that too. And she fingered the weapon in her hands, and she kept it tight within the seams of her pocket, waiting for him to make another move closer, another flash of his yellow eyes showing.

She wondered what was taking him so long in making that damn cake. She didn’t even want it in the first place. Her brother never celebrated her birthday in so long, that she was used to forgetting about her birthday, and now it seemed that he wanted to give her the only gift he knew he could give her, as not only was her brother a fine doctor and a fine pianist, but he was also a fine cook. She didn’t care that her mother, who was now in heaven, would hear her thoughts, as angry and pinpricked as they were. Fuck him, she thought to herself. Fuck him and his perfect traits. My brother has to be the most perfect human being on this fucking planet. He could play the piano, he could cook, he could be a rich doctor and have a lovely housewife and live happily ever after. And then the families would repeat. He would leave his wife and she would be happy with her kids for a while (as she would find out that her husband was a fucking maniac and a wifebeater like she knew he would end up being) until she would be driven to drugs and suddenly the craziness that her husband had would spread to their children and one of the siblings would take care of the other and torture her too, much like this nice tightknit woven family. She could hear him putting in all the fine ingredients of the cake and putting it in the oven, and he could hear him shouting, “Just in a half hour you’ll be able to eat this cake, you little bitch.” And there was that endearing nickname again. “Little bitch”. And she knew that she couldn’t eat this cake. It was probably filled with rat poison, or cyanide, or something worse.

She looked at the doors, and she knew she couldn’t escape. Her brother, the crafty genius, installed traps every time she would open one single door, one in the front of the house, one in the back of the kitchen to the tool shed (leaving her trusty old rusty toothed razor blade back in there along with her peace and sanity). Her brother, the insane prick that had so much intelligence, but little sense, little meticulousness, he bought black paint and smeared the windows with the ebonite. He didn’t want anyone to see what he was doing to the precious little girl that used to be Mommy’s Favorite, who used to be the grand old girl who would achieve everything in the world, and no one, not even the neighbors, could see her fur being sprayed with red pyrosun, the red furyglaze, the red red kroovy blood that would spread throughout the house and become the new royal carpet, in this house of kings, where her brother was surely the master, the grand leader who had a say in everything in his own little world, who had a control of not only his bones and blood and teeth, but also his fortress, his playthings, his toy room.

Her brother, the crazy sex maniac and the crazy eater of blood. And she thought on that day when she slashed her brother’s wrist, and if only he was an idiot and didn’t know what to do when his wrists were bladed through. If only she went down the block. Not across the street. All the bullies at her school told her that when they learned she was cutting herself. If only she used that knowledge to good use. For herself and her brother.

His teeth could sear through the dark glaze of the ebonite in that bathroom, it could melt all the ice cubes, it could cut through Blaze’s soul if only she wasn’t so strong, so powerful, on that very day. And he said again, with his wicked tongue, with his wicked teeth, “Come here, you little bitch! I’ll make sure you’ll know who the real god is around here! I’ll let you know who the real puppeteer is! And it’s me, and you’re the goddamn puppet! Give me your arm, your leg, you little goddamn filthy crusty slut!”

And with the glint of the razor blade’s only shining metal, she took it out, the blade was attached to a toothbrush, and she prepared to leap at him as he held the saw and tried to cut through her limps, her hopes of becoming that pretty little girl that would gain all the love from everyone in the whole goddamn world that his brother so much craved. If only the saw was a useful weapon when people were faster and swifter than him, as while Smoke was clever, he was never very athletic, and the blade made deep gashes on his stomach, the sides of his face, and his hands, until eventually, Blaze yelled with the topmost of her lungs, hoping that the neighbors would hear the commotion all the way from their bathroom and learn what kind of fucked up person Smoke was, the man who wanted to be a nice little doctor, the nice little doctor who had serrated wrists that flowed a deep nearly black river of blood, much like his hate, much like the dark deep pits of his eyes.

And he yelled also with the topmost of his lungs, gazing at the blood that was spilled, realizing that Blaze, his darling little sister, was about to make him bleed to death. Even with his wrist scarred and still spraying a blast of blood, he grabbed her wrist that was holding the weapon, stared at her with her golden eyes that also had dark deep pits, and he said, “Drop the weapon right now, or I’ll call 911, lay my soon-to-be dead body on the bath of ice, and make it look like that you did it, which you did, you little fucking whore. And how are you going to explain that to the police, huh? They won’t believe you. Especially that I never had a goddamn criminal record in my life and you’re a troubled kid at school who had an obsession with fucking razor blades. Help me get a tourniquet now, you fucking cunt!”

The last words hissed out of him like an enraged snake, like heat before it burst something to flames, and Blaze knew that even though she hated her big brother, he was right. There was no way they would believe her that her brother was trying to play his sick little games, especially with the school saying that she possibly had a mental illness. And no one believed anyone who even had the slightest puddle of mercury in their brain.

And she found a rubber tourniquet in her brother’s medical supplies, and he told her how to wrap his wrist up, and she thought she was playing the role of a good sister, saving her brother’s life, when her brother wouldn’t even save hers if she was dying and bleeding and screaming. In fact, he would’ve liked to masturbate to it. And she scowled and bit her lip as her brother was saved, as all the black kroovy blood was inside his system, and his scars soon healed up nicely, and he wouldn’t have to go to a doctor for it, as he could stitch it up himself with no issues, as even if Smoke wasn’t athletic, he had the healing hands of a doctor.

She almost killed her brother. She almost did it. And he was just saved. By her. The bringer of death and bringer of life. That was her. She was Death, except with her trusty rusty razor blade, that her brother soon took away from her and put it with his medical supplies, saying that she could have her toys back if she was a good girl and she did everything he told her to do. And her brother was definitely not going to buy her another one, and he kept all the disposable razors locked up in his little treasure chest, and he was the only one who had the key.  
And she thought she was growing fond of that razor blade. She was going to call him Rippy.

And as she thought and thought, rubbing her fingers against the leather of the seat, slowly picking up speed, hoping that she would spark up a flame and burn down the whole house that was her brother’s kingdom, she had a spark of flame in her head. 

Her brother would never make a birthday cake for her. He would never celebrate her birthday, unless he had an idea of exacting revenge on her on this very special day. And she wanted to scream and cry and beg someone, anyone, to let her out of this hell, as she now knew the fate of Rippy the Razor, her only friend in the tool shed that she grew to like and love. His rusty teeth, his silver that gleamed a little like pearls on the top and sides! Her only friend was gone by her brother’s hands, and he was dead now, as dead as a dead head Fred. And her brother won’t make her have another friend again, as she knew he would go into the tool shed and rip up her diary, take away all the shovels and spades and possibly lock them up too in his little treasure chest, and he would eat all her sweets she hoarded as her guidance counselor felt sorry for her and gave her little Hershey dark chocolate nuggets to cheer her up and to try to get her to tell the truth about what was happening in her own little home that wasn’t a home, but a kingdom of Hell.

“Blaze…” he called, with his sneery voice. “Blaze…come here, you little cuntish whore, I brought a surprise for you. You know, for your birthday. I made you a delicious cake!”

She wanted to run and hide, but she knew her brother would only find her and punish her even more. If she even tried to fiddle with the doors and unhinge the little traps he crafted with his diligent hands, he would only catch her and punish her even more if she tried to hide away. So she remained in her seat, sweat pouring down her skin, as her brother’s shadow began to lurk around the horizon of the kitchen light, before she caught a glimpse of silvery white fur, his golden eyes with the pits like the pits of rotten peaches, his voice like the screeching of angry macaws.

And he brought her a chocolate cake, with a smirk on his face. It looked like the most scrumptious chocolate cake she ever saw. Its icing was made with real dark chocolate fudge, and it looked moist, and he dabbed it with cream at the very top, and she knew her brother, the great cook, made the best cream she ever tasted, back when her mother was around.

“I toiled with this for a long time, so you better eat this. Happy birthday, slut.”

She wanted to shake her head no. Her eyes brimmed with tears. She knew that the cake had a deadly surprise in it. It would make her gums and teeth even worse. It would make the cuts from his brother’s saw look like only little scrapes she would get at the playground when she was a little girl. But she knew she had no choice. She couldn’t run. She couldn’t hide. She couldn’t disappear like magic, like in those Harry Potter books that were the only things that brought her sanity when she read them in her tool shed, that she knew even if they were library books her brother would tear them up too. She had to eat the cake. She had to eat the most delicious, but yet most deadly cake she would ever put her mouth on.

Smoke handed her a fork, one made of ornate silver. And she cut a thin slice of it, and her tears streaming down her cheeks, she put the piece in her mouth, and began to chew, slowly.

It was the best cake she ever ate.

And this piece didn’t had the deadly surprise.

But she still cried, even if it was so delicious. She knew what was coming. And she began to pray to God, as she cut out another piece on her fork, and brought it to her mouth.

And as she slowly delved in the dark chocolate fudge, hoping that this wouldn’t have the surprise, it did. And her tongue began to stream a small pool of blood. Her gums also experienced sharp pain, and blood riverred down her lips.

There was the fate of Rippy the Razor. Her brother did this, only to exact his revenge. A sweet, horrible revenge that she grew to hate him more and more in her heart that had a pit as black as his eyes. She could taste the rust on the serrated edge, and her brother told her that she was allowed to pull it out, to discover the prize inside her cake. Her mouth stung badly as she wretched it free, and she sobbed, screaming, as her only friend in the world, the only sacrificer of pain into tranquility, was killed before her very eyes, and was baked into a cake, much like serial killers who were also cannibals roasted meat of their victims in French fries.

After that, her brother threw the cake in the trash. The best-tasting cake that her brother had baked, for hours, with his own cut and bleeding hands, was wasted, just for a little taste of revenge.

And after that, that was the night her brother forgot about the old bottle of her mother’s Percocet, and she tried to kill herself with it.

And as she sat in the hospital, rubbing her fingers against the green leather seats, hoping it would spark to flame with her fingers, she wished that she succeeded, and she got to see Rippy the Razor in heaven. And she wondered if inanimate objects that were given souls were allowed in heaven.

 

—

Edge

The woman is perfected  
Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,  
The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her legs  
Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:  
We have come so far, it is over.

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,  
One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.  
She has folded

Them back into her body as petals  
Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odours bleed  
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

The moon has nothing to be sad about,  
Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.  
Her blacks crackle and drag.

-Sylvia Plath

The scars burned like fire, underneath his skin, waiting to bubble and brew his blood like an overheated pot. The nurse disinfected it and put another white cloth bandage on it. She wondered if Sonic was hurting himself again. Why yes yes my dear, I have been hurting myself again in case you’re wondering. The darkness isn’t going to recede fast any time soon, my time grows smaller and thinner and the seconds and minutes are dimming. So the only thing to let out my pain is bloodletting, to scream with bloody scars, to listen to the Black Beauty’s song, her melancholic awful hideous voice that comes from the gutturals of her pitch black throat, I can hear it and it’s telling me that with the beating of her heart in her breast, with the blades in her fingers sharpened and straight-lined and silver like razor blades, she is repeating, endlessly, her vociferous song.

Kill me.  
Kill me.  
Kill me.

Sonic wrote that on a slip of paper with a black Crayola, and the nurses regarded it as a suicide threat, but was it really? To gaze into his sorrowful, black empty hollow pits as eyes and see the pain that has been welling up inside, that has lasted for many years, for many dismal dark days that he had wish for the razor blades in his gloved fingers and tear out his flesh with even so much as a simple scratch on the itchy back.

The nurses, however, didn’t regard that. They put him again on one on one, the suicide watch, the nurse staring at him as he ate his soup for lunch, not saying a single word. His mouth was glued, and he couldn’t say anything to anyone. Silence seemed to fill the void that Amy Rose had gifted the ward with, the many patients growing smaller and quieter as well, as they all knew now that they could simply send them to the Chronics Ward if they acted out against them. Their voices were weaker. And even Sonic himself has noticed that both Big’s and Tails’ voices were weaker and smaller and quieter, and so was his. His words were soup. Simple, flat, liquid, lukewarm, and it left a bad aftertaste. So Sonic didn’t say anything. There was nothing worth saying anymore.

Dr. Splinter was growing stronger since Sonic’s defeat in Wonderland. He could sense him, grinning as he surrounded himself with his souvenirs, his treasures, with his black fangs and his black one eye and his black skin. Sonic saw the real form of the King of Spades, and it was a creature that definitely came from the foulest pits of Hell, reserved for the cruelest human beings, home of Hitler and Stalin. Dr. Splinter was no longer a doctor, or was he any longer a man, but a monster, a dark human footed and human bodied with completely charred charcoal skin monster that possibly ate the insides of his victims before he took their skin and flesh and mounted them on his wall, with their poetry laid out before him, the scars on their skin, their holes and pimples and gashes, they were all small little stories to him, brand new books for him to read, except he was never interested in the characters and only wished for their demise. He would gaze at the intricate maze of their veins and never wished that he would reach the heart, but rather, how would the person get stuck there in the first place. He was interested merely in just stories, plots, but not the characters, they were only meals as he would take the one thing that was dear to them and showed them off like rifles and deer horns.

Sonic’s tongue couldn’t stop feeling at the empty gap where his fang was supposed to be. And the empty gap where his sanity used to lie.

His head wouldn’t stop burning, quilling and stabbing with sharp little pin needles, searing and contorting his brain into black crinkles, like slips of paper on fire, little bloodied leaves that soon had their veins burned away. He held his head and wanted the pain to stop, and nurses told him they would give him aspirin for the pain. But the headache felt intense, mind-rotting and a sharp thud as the hammer slammed on it over and over again, and the tears in his eyes were brimming and ready to boil over, as he couldn’t take the pain in his arms, he couldn’t take the pain in his chest, and now his head was full of miseries, and he knew that one simple Tylenol wasn’t going to solve it. If anything, the Tylenol might even make it worse, as he was sure he could remember something the King of Spades did, that would make his pain grow stronger, make the dark dirge breathe out louder and fully with the lady’s red plumped lips.

Kill me.  
Kill me.  
Kill me.

He hissed, he could feel all of that hurt welling, he could feel his heart beat shake inside his bloodied chest, he could feel it tick like a clock as every second seemed to pass by so slowly, if only the dark days of the afternoon would go away fast enough! Tick tock! Tick tock! Tick tock tick!

The sweat in his face riverred, his ears twitched, his mask was dissolving away, as the other patients simply didn’t want to hear about his worries, but no, they wanted to live in their own little fantasy worlds, with Bark and Bean watching FOX News, Nack listening to his metal stations, Blaze rubbing her fingers faster as she seemed to remember something, and Rouge reading a boring book that didn’t interest her at all, but she read it, simply because there was nothing else better to do but to be bored shitless by a writer that couldn’t write worth a damn and only wanted a meager paycheck for his well-polished hunk of shit in a shiny hardcover shell that looked like a jewel, only housing the worst collections of words stringed together like a pearl necklace of human teeth with the nerve endings still attached to them.

He wanted to shout out to them all that they were simply those hunks of shit, all lined up neatly with a thin white string, easy to snap, easy to cut and let all the shit from your proudly shining necklace fall out, with a loud plop and the smell overriding your senses once you realized what you were carrying around your neck was shit.

He looked at his purple wrists. What would it take to open up his stitches. What would it take to let his blood flow out of him again, until he was shriveled and pale and coarse, and he would be dead, and he would finally take God’s answering machine and break it apart in nice little black shards and say, “Fucker, you should’ve put my parents on the Block list, and if they said you were so loving and that you were the answer, how come you only produced more questions, more contradictions, more miseries than love and acceptance? I’ll punch you right in the fucking jaw, no I’ll nail you like your son Jesus Christ, and you can take all my sins and wash me away with the hot burning holy water that will make my flesh as pink as a baby’s newborn skin. And maybe I will be right to my parents. And maybe I will be free. But even you can’t give me freedom. No fucking freedom for me, because you gotta give all the freedom to my father.” The purple wrists seemed to glow under the snowy lights, and they were begging him the same dirge, the same song, in that plaintive, whiny voice that he recognized as his own voice, buried deep within the blue and red wires.

Kill me.  
Kill me.  
Kill me.

“Here’s your Tylenol, Mr. Seabrooks.”  
If only he could take hundreds of them. Thousands. Millions. Eat them all with their bitter sweetness in their candy-coated shells and be free of all this ricketing mess.

He swallowed it with the water that looked like it had small particles of dirt in a paper Dixie cup, and he wished they would work instantly, that the pain would recede and he could go back to concentrating on what his next plan to defeat the King of Spades would be. He hadn’t seen Shadow anywhere, not even after the battle, and he wondered if he was disappointed in him, found out that he was the wrong chosen one after all, and that he moved on to someone else, or that he thought he would never find a chosen one as good as him ever again. And he never had this thought before in his life, as the purple scars illuminated and the sweat poured down and the pain kept throbbing, that he thought he wanted to hear Shadow’s voice, he wanted to see his blood eyes, his ripped quills, and even if he didn’t look comforting, he was. He was the shining light in the moon, the red blood in the sun, the stabbing glow of the stars. He wanted all of those things. He wanted everything in the world. He wanted to be okay. He wanted to be happy. But most of all, he wanted to be free.

Free as a blackbird.

That flies away into the darkest, blackest pits of night that were inside his eyes, that reeked of tales of sadness and defeat, of pity and misery, of failures and regrets and morbid fantasies.

Like how he wanted to lie his body on the burner of the hospital’s kitchen, and burn his body until it was black like the King of Spades.

How he wanted to be hanged by the rattlesnake with the long fangs and the long tail that sizzled with anger.  
The gun that would fire and stop the burning inside his mind with some nice cold ice created from the simple spark of flame. An iceburn that would soothe and heal him from the wells of his soul.

“I gotta go to the bathroom,” he said.  
Go.

Kill me.  
Kill me.  
Kill me.

Kill me with the color black.

The nurse followed.  
Fuck shit damn it.  
How could he die when two eyes were watching?

How strong was the nurse?  
Was she capable of catching the fastest runner in his high school junior class?  
Even faster than all of the seniors?  
Was she capable of holding down someone who carried a sword that felt like a hundred pound paperweight?

He grinned, his one fang missing from his mouth, his tongue rolling around it, trying to soothe it from its missing friend.

It was time to leave.

…Used to this sort of thing…  
…His blacks crackle and drag…

The piss would smell like honey, as he came walking through the wilted hallway.

The lights screeched and screamed in his eyes, but he paid it no mind.

The pink blanket, the skin of the newborn baby, it was coiled up like a rattlesnake, comforting with the eyes of innocence as he would wrap it up around his neck and break all the wires inside it, break and crush the metal that rested in the crooks of his neck.

The mercury thickened, it flowed within his rivers of life.

The dark green puked on the canvas.  
The artist took no time at all to splash yet more piss and shit for the newly christened eight million dollar eyesore, the million dollar mindsore, the free ignorance and the free blindness and mindlessness.

He coiled the snake, choking it, breaking the metal in his body, the forked fires in his throat, the pale blue eyes of a child.  
The milky fangs that was missing one.

The nurse stood and stared. She wasn’t sure why she was, but she plainly wanted to see if he could do it.  
He might just well damn could.

Used to this sort of thing. Used to this sort of thing. Used to this sort of thing.

He could feel it stealing the air from his lungs, the asphyxiation ballooning up to his brain.  
The nurse did nothing. But smiled.

He could hear wicked, dribbling laughter coming from the halls.

Just a little more further…

He could see the flash of red in the cut of the knife, the flash of black in the shedding of the moon and stars.  
He stared at him, and said, “Phony.”  
Is that all you have to say? Say something else right now, before I…before I…  
His tongue hissed like fire.  
The one that was cut and stolen from Dr. Splinter.  
His eyes grew to be small cuts from the Ire’s knife.  
His body grew longer, his hands were razor blades, his teeth were curved and sharp like guillotines, his tail swished and summoned forth a powerful wind that nearly blew Sonic’s lifeless corpse from the hospital and smacking into the Plexiglas window.

He had that breath of the release. For only a few seconds.

The dragon roared a cacophonous breath, filled with wicked poisons and wicked prayers, as he tore him away from the innocent rattlesnake that only wanted to do the good of the world for his lord and savior Satan and Hitler and Stalin, and Sonic fell to the ground as his dull, whitened glazed eyes suddenly were sprouted back to life, like little shoots of grass.

And he breathed the sigh of entrapment.  
“Phony,” he said. “Don’t do that again. Or if you do that again…”  
“And…what will you do…if I do it again?”  
“I’ll…I’ll…”  
“You’ll what?” he rasped.  
“I’ll cry.”  
And his eyes stiffened. His body went numb and lifeless, for only a short while.  
“Are you sure?”  
He nodded his head vigorously.

The oxygen was fully in his head and lungs, his body relaxed, he could see the rise and fall of his chest as he was given the kiss of life from the dragon of death, and he only stared at the dark green walls and the white tiles, thinking if he stared at them long enough, they would be mixed into a solid green, a better color than dark green.  
“Okay then,” he said. “I won’t do it ever again. For you.”

He was used to this sort of thing.  
His blacks crackled and dragged.


	22. Nightmares and Electric Visions

The sounds of footsteps were growing louder. They were ringing in her ears, the sounds of breathing, the sounds of stomping, the sounds of guns clicking and being loaded with extra bullets. The men smoked their cigars, the silver smoke hanging in the air and choking her nostrils, and she could see the walls were stained with a little brown rust, possibly dirt or blood that has collected over the years. The men laughed uproariously while they played black jack, their cigar smoke wafting in the air, their mouths blowing it like steamed up teapots, as their evil brown eyes that were the same color as the wall, brown and rusted with a little splatter of blood, gazed up at her, and they chortled, as they played with their guns and carried what seemed to be a black metal baseball bat, the man even having trouble carrying it as it was made with nothing but solid steel, not hollowed out aluminum like she knew most bats were like now, because kids were little pieces of shit and they didn’t know that if you hit someone over the head with these fucking things they would bleed like a motherfucker.

“Roseanne…” They snickered and crackled. “Roseanne, we have a nice little surprise for you. That’s why you’re here…that’s why you’re here…that’s why we wrapped you up with cable wires and gagged your mouth, because it’s such a nice little surprise…Roseanne…”

They were calling her name mockingly, laughing like the little shitfaced hyenas they were, as one man practiced swinging with the bat, slicing through the air, whistling and hurting the Air Spirit with so much pain that it whined with a loud screech. He couldn’t stop having a big white pearly grin on his face, none of the men couldn’t stop smirking and snickering and slithering like snakes, as they carried guns, bats, sex toys, and malice against Roseanne the bat, who was only a mere prostitute who simply wanted the money so she could buy more cocaine. Cocaine was the only thing she cared about in this world and cocaine was the only thing that cared for her. She had a daughter, named Rouge, but she didn’t care for her, because she was nothing but a piece of shit whore that would grow up like her, much like her father was, wherever he was, possibly marching in the streets and working in a factory with leaden air in China. She remembered him reading on all of those books on Karl Marx and Communism and hating everything “corporate America” was, so she guessed that was where he was, in the land of bamboo and dynasties.

“Roseanne…it’s time for you to take your medicine…Roseanne…it’s time for you to have your nice little surprise…”

Rouge was born in 1982, two years after she met her eccentric father and got married and had a child together and lived in a trailer home with two pitbulls in their yard and the walls were stained with yellow nicotine and she turned on a police surveillance device, that always echoed throughout the halls with loud and obnoxious pitches and screeches, to keep track of the pigs in uniform. She always wore too short skirts and had poofy hair (as was the style in the 80s) and a shirt that always showed her stomach, that had small stretch marks as her so-called husband carried around the white bundle of maggots and flies, her little so-called daughter, Rouge. She smoked another slim cigarette, held between two fingers that made a V-shape, her bloodshot eyes and her weeks of not sleeping so prominent to Gary Nicholls, as he rocked little Rouge Nicholls to sleep, the bat that came from her, from her worn out and tired vagina that she knew didn’t need a damn baby to come out of it, it needed to house dicks inside it like it always did, because that was the only way she could make money. But now she had a family, with a husband she never loved in the first place, with a daughter she never loved when it came out of her and even when she carried her, and she couldn’t get how most of America could stand this bullshit, to live with someone you never loved with a child you never loved living in a piece of shit house that might as well been a trash heap, surrounded by her now dead mother’s little glass animals that she haven’t sold yet to people who were interested in them (i.e. Suckers, as none of her mother’s trash was a treasure, not to her, anyways) and posters of Madonna and Def Leppard, bands that she heard of a few times and never cared much about either, but yet her husband demanded that their house needed a few sparks of life, a little redneck oddities to keep it alive and to make everyone avoid their little abode.

“Gary, how about you just surrender that child to adoption already, I ain’t gonna take care of her no more. I got things to do. I don’t need a shitting and crying baby to take care of after all that.”  
Gary looked up at her, his blue eyes sparkling in his horn-rimmed spectacles. “Doing what that makes you so busy that you don’t want to look after your own damn child?”  
“I got two jobs, Gary. I’m an actress and I work at the iron factory south of here. I ain’t got time for her. Just put her in adoption already for Christ’s sake.”  
“You know what you are too, Roseanne. You’re a prostitute. That’s how I met you. You know it. Stop telling yourself you’re an actress and that you work at the factory because both of us know that’s not true. Stop feeding yourself these fucking lies in your head. Maybe you would be a better person if you didn’t live in a fantasy land all the time.”  
“And there’s your little psychoanalysis bullshit you’re feeding me!” She snuffed out her cigarette, and then proceeded to light another one. She needed the crack in her system. It’s been almost a day since she had her fill. So cigarettes would have to help her now, save her God, save her Jesus, the idols she never worshipped but her mother did and she was dead now, with a gunshot wound to the head by her ex. This is why she’s been feeling so goddamn shitty that she needed to start another shitfest with her so-called husband, right in front of her so-called baby. “If you’re so smart, why don’t you get a job? You could go to college, you could be a doctor! And then you could support my poor ass, huh, Gary? You pile of shit!”  
“I simply don’t want to be like those snobs who think they’re better than everyone else! I’d rather be a fucking redneck than a fucking plastic bourgeois man living on wine and little else!”

Rouge awoke from her slumber, heard the clamor in their voices, and started to cry.

“Oh good job Gary, you made the little maggot cry.”  
“Stop calling her a maggot when you’re one yourself!”  
“I don’t shit myself and have a big gaping hole to stuff myself with brown colored garbage.”  
“Shut the fuck up you slut!”  
“I’m an actress, Gary! Not a slut, not a whore, and definitely not a prostitute!”  
“Whatever!”

Rouge continued to cry, as her father held her closely, feeling the sharp stabs of the cold wind as her so-called mother walked away from the house, the screen door shutting with a bang that caused Rouge’s crying to grow louder.  
His father shushed her, bounced her in his knees, bobbing up and down much like a crane who needed to eat his fill of fish for today, and his father started to sing to her in a low voice, one that sounded smooth like corduroy, smooth like the cigarette smoke’s lines as it still hung in the air as her mother smoked outside of their trailer, her red eyes staring outside of their window, her mean scarred gaze that Rouge’s small aqua eyes were fixated on, as Papa Gary began his song.

The mountain tops glow  
With the sun’s light that falls like snow  
The fog surrounds us and it would tell  
Of a story of a man who fell  
His mind cracked, his eyes ached  
He realized that money was power and everything was at stake  
Everything was dark, everything was silent  
So he put a silver cock next to his head and caused a riot  
The sun couldn’t shine then, it was too vain  
Because the sun only shines for the well and sane

Rouge cooed, and noticed by the time she gazed back at the window, her mother was gone, counting her money, seeing how much more she needed to get a little crack in her system, a little white rock that could keep her away from this place that certainly the sun never shined on, the place where darkness brewed, in the caverns of the alleyways, where pitiful men only existed to lie cheat and steal Roseanne’s life away. The crack helped her, for only a little while, before the men threatened her, before she was put in a situation like she was right now, with yet more rapes, more searing cuts on her dress and body, more blood streaming on the floors as the men continued to cut her with these razor blades, just to see the nice sparkle of sherry from her body flow.

Her father tried to care for the little maggot. He tried to care for her until he left the both of them, until the house’s bills began to pile, until her walls were bare and she could sell no more of her dead mother’s crystal animals, until she even tried to sell the Madonna and Def Leppard posters, even tried to sell her husband’s books on Communism and Karl Marx that he couldn’t take with him, but eventually they lost their redneck little home, with the nicotine stained walls, the glass animals that once inhabited it, the crib that she kept in Rouge’s room even though she got too big to fit inside of it, and they lived in the streets, where she continued to sell her body for cocaine, while Rouge tried to survive on anything she could get, as her mother certainly wasn’t going to look out for her. She was too busy. She was too busy climbing her way to fame with her acting skills. She was going to be bigger than Marilyn Monroe, bigger than Dolly Parton, by the selling of her breasts and her tired, worn out vagina. 

But yet as death was staring at her in the face, she couldn’t feel a single tinge of regret. Her mind was empty; her mind was obliterated away with the snow white powder, the powder that kept her alive when nothing else could. Not even her passions, not even her daughter, and certainly not her husband.

“Roseanne…Roseanne…”

They kept calling her name, with malice and misery on their tongues, holding a dildo, ready for the bat to swing, ready for the guns to fire. And as she thought on all the moments in her past, asking herself if she regretted anything at all in her life, she said no. She didn’t. Cocaine was the only thing that kept her alive. Cocaine was the only reason for her to live. God gave her no other reasons. The white crystal powder was enough. Not her daughter, not her husband, just the drug that made her achieve heaven, who made her into a happy person for a few minutes, and then she would need more, and right now it’s been hours since she last had the drug in her nostrils, and she sweat, her voice was parched, her eyes had a crevice of blood in the corners, she hadn’t slept in weeks again, and she barely ate anything more than a morsel that she could get out of a garbage can and a couple cigarettes and maybe a beer. Her hands and body couldn’t stop shaking, even if they were restrained heavily with cable wire, but she thought at that moment that she wanted more of the drugs, she wanted to get high, at least one more time, before she died, but these monsters, these beasts, they wouldn’t let her get her few minutes of heaven for at least a few seconds, they laughed heavily and the cigarette smoke was surrounding her, making her eyes water and her nose barely breathe and filter through it, the men were no longer playing cards and ignoring her but watching her with interest and with anticipation, waiting for her brains to splatter on the wall, the rusted walls that needed more blood to feed. It needed more blood to breathe.

“Roseanne…”

She wanted to pray to God to give her at least one last snort before she went, to give her a little mercy. Cocaine was the only thing that made her into an actual person. Inside she was fake and hollowed and round. Anyone could see her act. Anyone could see her lies inside her body and inside her veins. They could see them before she said them with her black and nicotine stained mouth. Cocaine made her into an interesting person, a normal person, and she wanted to scream to have that one last dose of the drugs in her veins, anything at all to make her be in peace as they ended her life, but they continued to gaze at her with wide eyes, with wide smiles, with wide weapons ready to beat against her wide skull, and they laughed again, as the man pulled the bat back, as the dildos and sex toys were thrust inside her, and she muffled out a scream before the final thing she heard before everything went black and she was sent to Hell for the rest of eternity was, “Goodnight, miss Roseanne. You’ll get your few minutes of heaven. You’ll get your little surprise, your few minutes of heaven, right here!”

The wall was sprayed with a burst of black blood on the brown and yellow linoleum and rust, and she died instantly, her head completely bludgeoned and a pool of blood flowing from the crown of her head, and the men toyed with her body before they soon got bored with her and rolled her up in a carpet and buried her at a landfill.

Roseanne was buried beneath the brand new Dallas State Bank building, and no one knew, except Rouge, but there was nothing she could do to recover her body and to give her a proper burial and a proper eulogy, so she simply said goodbye to the bank, and continued to live on in the streets on her own, until she met the man with the feather in his hat, into his long black limousine, and she became a preteen prostitute.

Rouge thought what it was like to have your life end by the swinging of the bat, the hard metal bashing through your head and brains, and to have no regrets whatsoever in her life, not even that she didn’t take care of her daughter as much as she liked to, that she actually thought she was going to miss the little maggot, before she was sold into the same trade as her, the one who wanted to be an actress as big as Marilyn Monroe, as big as big could get, before she fell to the Earth, becoming stardust, the dust that she would oh so love to snort into her nose and through her brain, for one last time.

—

Sonic awoke, finding that the walls were no longer dark green and white, but piss yellow and bare, the linoleum stained with rust, stained with shit. He could hear the moans and screams and wailings in the distance, sounding like he was in a savanna, surrounded by hyenas, laughing themselves maniacally as they awaited his inevitable death until they could rip apart his flesh and bone with their crescent-shaped fangs, with their silent red eyes watching, with the heat wavering the distant horizon, making him sweat and hallucinate an icy mountain in the sky that awaited for him to take a climb up its icy gown, cooling himself of the sun’s heat that drizzled on his back. He thought for a moment that he was in Africa, away from the terrible hospital, to a home where hedgehogs had originated, and while he was in a land of poverty and disease, it was better than Wonderland, because it was a constant land of death and hopelessness. But as his eyes adjusted to the bright light and the yellow walls that made it painful and throbbing, the nurses were talking to each other over him, black silhouettes hidden under the stabbing light, and he noticed immediately that he couldn’t control his arms and legs. He looked to his left, then to his right, discovering that he was restrained, with black painful latches, and staring into the nurses’ faces were painful, as he could literally see nothing of their upper torso, not even their eyes, as the wailings and cryings and groans were growing louder, as he could see a blur of other patients inside their individual cells, stretching their hands and laughing with mania and laughing with drunkenness of insanity, as they never saw this hedgehog before in this ward. He was new meat, the new meat about to be grilled on Dr. Splinter’s grill, and they laughed and sang and pissed themselves and yelled and yelped and flailed themselves about or walked repetitively in a tight-knit circle or they simply made no response at all but looked at their wrists, trying to cut through it with their dull fingernails, surrounded by bare whiteness as all the cells were padded, some smeared with shit, some with piss stains on them or blood, and Sonic wished this was all a dream, that he was never here, in the underbelly of Wonderland where most of its insanity had thrived, in the Disturbed Ward.

I work a little at the Disturbed Ward Sonic. It’s constantly loud, it smells awful, and it’s not properly air conditioned so even in the winter it can be really hot for some reason…sometimes I hear really strange noises, like little weird…murmurs…

He could smell the scent of shit and piss and drool and blood and iodine and Lysol, all the scents mixed together in a special concoction in his nose. And he wanted to puke. His fingers twitched, and his body began to shake erratically, as there was one emotion that he thought he could never understand in his mind, and that was fear. He was afraid. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want electroshock therapy. He didn’t want a lobotomy. This is what usually happened to all the patients in this ward. They were given many electroshock treatments, or a stake was driven to the upper lobe of their brain, bruised, and no longer functioning in this fast-paced world that soon became as slow as molasses, as slow as the severely retarded, and they were no longer men, but caricatures, broken shells of the people they once were, as they shriveled up and curled inside their own bodies, the snake retreating to its stomach, its scales and liquid bone. In desperation, Sonic prayed to God, even if he was only a mere answering machine now, his son somewhere far away (possibly listening to his parent’s calls for the umpteenth time), that he didn’t want either of those things, and he wished he would be taken out of this ward, as it was entirely a mistake and he didn’t deserve to be here why would he be here why would he need to be here? His eyes looked around, and they twitched as much as his fingers as he wanted to pry himself free of his locks and chains, as he could see the nurses’ lips pursing, their breasts heaving much like they were actual heads that could breathe as they were crushed in their tight bras and their tight shirts, and they said to him, waving their petite fingers and flashing their fingernails that were the same color of licorice candy, “Nah uh uh. Good boys don’t free themselves of their locks. They wait to see what’s coming to them. They wait and see what his punishment for being such a bad boy is. If you wanted so much to be a good boy, then you would stay put, you would wait and see what the taste of your own medicine is.”

Come and taste your own medicine!

Rouge’s eyes popped open, her blue veined flesh in sweat, her aqua eyes gazing around the room, wondering if there was anyone inside this damnable place that wanted to hurt her, anyone that was going to smash her head with a solid metal baseball bat, shoot her with their guns, or possibly abuse their “privileges” of having a prostitute, by treating her like they’re own person slave, their own personal sex toy. And as she searched for any weapons held in the air, a person that she knew absolutely didn’t belong here, she found none. Except Bark, who investigated her late night awakening and thought that possibly something was wrong. At the sight of him standing near her bed, concerned, her chest relaxed, her eyes no longer paranoid, and at Bark’s request, she explained the nature of her nightmare, the nature of the belief that such a thing could happen to her too.

Her own mother died at the hands of people like those, people who wished only to harm others for their own gain. To abuse so many drugs, to have so much sex, to have so much money from selling their crack rocks, that they were literally above people, above celebrities, that they were like gods in the Dallas street, but were lower than pigs, lower than hyenas who laughed only at the despair of an aging lion as he is driven out of his misery with sharp teeth and humiliation.

She covered her head with her hands, the blue withered willow tree she was, her eyelids dusted with sleep and anxiety, the red crevices to her prickled eyeballs. Her nails stretched, scratching the sides of her face, wishing the red bleed would show through, but the doctors have numbed them down, and she couldn’t escape from this torment she felt in her skin, and her wings felt rusted and decayed. She wished so much that she would stop having these dreams, she would stop remembering about her mother and even feeling a little sorry for her, as her mother never cared for her, never cared for the little bundle of maggot that she always called Rouge, she never cared that her own daughter was hungry, was sick and needed care, was hurt, was sad, but yet when she thought of her mother beaten in the head with a bat, tortured and nearly skinned alive, she thought that maybe one day, the same fate would happen to her. The same fate would fall upon her like wretched storms and wretched dead gods that fell from the skies like stardust, but yet the fate of someone who was going to be nothing more but a prostitute for the rest of her godforsaken life just like her mother, it was written in the stars and the sky, and she would fall like a shooting comet as well, the line of cocaine dashed off with a razor blade, her mother’s drug of choice. How she used to always stare at her mother sorting through it, with her credit cards or a blade, as the cigarette smoke streamed in the air like an Indian smoke signal on her ashtray, as she laughed and talked to no one but herself (Or maybe she had imaginary friends too and she was talking to them about how she just got a deal to be in the next Hollywood blockbuster, and that she used to be an extra in Gone with the Wind.), and mercutiously she would snort and chortle and giggle and snicker and she would brush her hair, her big brown poofy ‘80s style hair, and say that she was going to be a star, the next god in Mount Olympus who would be chosen to die for the fate of the humans.

Her nails, how whittled down they were! They used to been long tendrils of crescents, ready to scratch long cracks in her skin. The nurses soon discovered her self-harming, and she was put on One on One for a while, and then they clipped her nails. And no more could she scratch. But she still bit. She still punched. Purple splotches and red bite marks stained her body, and the only one who got to know those things were Bark, who simply said as he stared at them, “And doing this is actually going to solve anything? Do you know Rouge? Has this actually solved anything for you?”

And she would sit in silence, and shrug her shoulders. And say, “I dunno. It just makes me feel better.”  
“It’s pointless to hurt yourself just for a fading emotion. Why would anyone look at your flawed, hurt body and say that you are a beautiful woman? No one, except pieces of shit, that’s who. You truly are a remarkable woman Rouge, when you allow yourself to be. But this injury to yourself isn’t going to solve anything. If anything, it will only make you uglier. It will only make you deader.”  
And she said, “I like being more dead. It makes me feel more alive.”  
“And why would you say that contradiction?”

“Because to know that I’m dying gives me more life, more wonder in the world. Because I am excited that I’m dying, I’m excited that I’m leaving this world, because I do not want to be like my mother, who was murdered by a bunch of drug lords. But I know that’s my only fate. The sun says so, the stars say so, and the moon says so. I am chosen to die like my mother. I am chosen to live like my mother. And I am chosen to not care about anyone but myself like my mother, except for cigarettes, the sweet mistress they call Mary Jane, and the sweet loving man known as Heroin. And I am a mess here. I haven’t had my fill of that drug for months. I haven’t had sex in months. I’ve had nothing but food that doesn’t taste like cigarette butts and people talking to me about my feelings, but my feelings are too masked to be revealed, as I do not know them myself. I think I would only feel better if I had that drug, Mr. Heroin, or at least a cigarette for Christ’s sake.” 

She closed her eyes tightly, like shut lids to bell jars (that are no doubt rotting away in the doctor’s office), and she threw her fist upon the bed, making herself and Bark bounce, but there would be no new bruise on her skin, no sore fingers, as Bark was watching, and he never approved of her harming herself, especially not on his watch, with his two unshedded green eyes.

“That’s all I want, Bark. I want to be dead. I’m sure in heaven I get to have all of the heroin and all of the cigarettes I want and all of the regret and all of the emptiness would melt away, like the fading sea off the shore. I wished I could end it all. I wished I could find a metallic baseball bat and bash my own fucking self in the head. Did you know that my mother always called me a maggot? Maggot Nicholls, the great daughter to the aspiring actress of Roseanne Nicholls, who’s going to be the next Marilyn Monroe, the next Dolly Parton, the next great big tragedy, the next great big tidal wave over culture, the American corporate culture that my dad used to fucking hate so much. Did you know my dad’s in China now? A great big Chinaman, not wanting to take care of his own white maggot daughter. He was the only one who actually attempted to raise me. I actually grew close to him until he suddenly up and left and took all of his clothes but not all of his books on Communism. He wanted to spread the philosophy to my mother too, but he said my mother was too stupid to appreciate such things. He once told me he was going to take me to China with him. I don’t much care for China, but I guess it would be a better place than being with my mother, being in here, but he never did. He forgot about me. I only remember his favorite song that he used to sing to me, something that I maybe shouldn’t have known when I was a child, but it gave me warmth and peace when nothing else could.”  
“And what song was it? Could you maybe sing it? Maybe it will bring you peace right now, especially with all those dreams you’ve been having.”

She sighed. She didn’t much like to hear the challenge to sing a song. It always terrified her, especially when her pimp used to make her sing the song when he discovered her voice, and wanted to hear it as he got ready to whore her out. In fact, he even advertised that she could sing beautiful songs for the men, and the stupid, slobbered men who always drank too much beer or had too much Mary Jane or Ms. Xanax, and her father’s song was the most famous out of all her songs, but yet when she was forced to sing it, it still brought her a type of inner peace, her own little miniature Buddha inside her body who flowed zen all throughout.

“Alright. My father used to sing it in Mandarin, but hell do I know the Mandarin version, because I can’t speak a word of it. But he soon decided to sing the English version, the version that he said reminded him of how that awful America would burn down, and never would it try to use its awful maidens of media or sell another awful product or try to get someone to eat a greasy hamburger at McDonald’s ever again.”

She took a deep breath, gathering all the air in her cigarette tarred lungs, and she sang the song, one of the only remnants of her father she carried with her.

The mountain tops glow  
With the sun’s light that falls like snow  
The fog surrounds us and it would tell  
Of a story of a man who fell  
His mind cracked, his eyes ached  
He realized that money was power and everything was at stake  
Everything was dark, everything was silent  
So he put a silver cock next to his head and caused a riot  
The sun couldn’t shine then, it was too vain  
Because the sun only shines for the well and sane

The door was rusted, made of solid steel that was even difficult for the nurses to hold open, but it creaked loudly when it was ajar. He could see bloodstained words on it, saying boldly in his green panicking eyes, RUN FAR AWAY FROM HERE. He could hear groans being echoed from the other room, the old man that sung of old forgotten songs, while he waited for his pasty dinner to be fed through him with a spoon, and the nurses giggled, their breasts bounced, he could see violet eyes peeking out like sudden sparks of flame as they took him to the electroshock machine, the man singing with mirth, despite the room being completely gray, with bricks all around covered in graffiti and blood and shit, and he could hear his voice ringing through his ears as they put the device on his head and put the rubber molding in his mouth, and he wanted to scream, he wanted to kick his feet in the air, he wanted to run far, far away from here, to another land than Wonderland, to a place that was peaceful and to a land that was grand, possibly to New York or California, places where he would rather live in than Texas, especially not in a state that had this hellhole place still existing years after years, the system not realizing that it was the 8th layer of Hell itself, and shutting it down where no one could ever enter it again, and everyone would be safe and go to another hospital like Austin Lakes, which seemed like a cakewalk compared to here. Or Austin State, which he heard wasn’t a very good hospital, but still a much better place than here. The man’s voice bubbled in his ears, as the nurses prepared to ignite the switches on the machine, and were ready to pull the lever, like Dr. Victor Frankenstein before he gave birth to his monster.

Row row, row your boat, gently down the stream  
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream

The nurses chattered, laughing, giggling, smirking, before the man was gurgling through his apple sauce and pudding, singing again, repeating himself endlessly.

Woow woow, woow you boot, guntly dooon dah fream  
Murrily murrily murrily murrily, lafe iz mut a veam

It’s time to take your medicine…

Sonic Thaddeus Seabrooks…

We have a surprise for you…Sonic…

And they turned it on. The lights ignited, he could hear it faintly buzzing along with the ignorant man, and as he listened in on the crackling and the machine gathering heat, he suddenly felt it through his bloodstream and through his brain and through his arms and legs. ZAP! 

He muffled a yell in his rubber molding, his eyes clamped shut, his body shaking erratically once again as they pulled the switch, and his brain was on fire, the sparks of Zeus’ lightning bolts stabbed his brain, he wanted to slam his fists down the table and throw a tantrum much like a child would, because he wanted cake, and cake was always good when it was made with dragonflies and piss.

Row row, row your boat… (Gurgle, gurgle, mutters of approval from the applesauce and pudding and his juice)  
Gently down the stream…

Why did they send him here, to the land filled with cheesecake and lover’s defeat, the land where no one could find their feet? The sparks sparkled, his head flashed, he swore he was going to spill a snake from his mouth, the jaws oh how mighty was the one missing detachable fang!

He was a snake himself. He could detach his jaw. And swallow the whole world whole.

Phony…

And if you want, you can kiss my ass on that too…

Let’s go home, Sonic…

Gently down the stream…

He could hear the clatter of the nurse’s breasts as they grew feet and shoved him inside his sickle cell anemia. He was going to die in here, in padded brains, padded locks, the pillows comforting him, the angel maidens singing him to sleep, singing him down the stream…merrily merrily merrily merrily, life was but a dream. A wretched dream where the kittens ate the desecrated body of a dog who had no eyes but fangs like human teeth, as it wriggled like a dead human fetus, as the jaws continued to reach out, as the kittens licked and bit it like a mother’s nipple, as the fetus puppy continued to move about, its small stubby limbs trying to escape, before it was eaten down to a whittle, the kittens eating away his organs, his brain, his fangs too, as it shrieked loudly, shattering the blood-soaked mirrors, shattering the blood-soaked linoleum of the walls.

Dead limbless corpses were everywhere around him, struggling to be free of the hospital, as their blood-soaked bodies squirmed like worms, as he could hear the King of Spades laughing his dark laugh, as he could hear and feel the firebolts frying his brain.

Don’t die…

Because if you do…

I’ll cry…

His arms were rotting off his body. He would become limbless as well, like the bodies that were only turkeys ready to be roasted for the nice Christmas feast (Dead head Fred! Dead head Fred!). He would become yet another corpse of the King of Spades. He would stretch his skin and make a map of it. He would keep his fur and make a blanket out of it, while wearing his teeth and fangs around his neck.

His eyes were falling off him, his green shallow questioning pupils staring back at him, as they sat on his lap, wanting him to ask, why?.

He was blind.

Goddam nurses in this hospital…

Trying to kill Phony…

This hospital…

I’m going to fucking kill all of them!

He could hear the shattering of glass, as all the patients shouted rapturously, as if Jesus had come to save them, save them of their own personal hells. Some continued to sit there and scratch their flesh just to see if a little bleed was going to come through. They were waiting for their own personal Jesus to come through their bodies, in their own deaths.

If they don’t want to be saved, then they don’t have to be…

He rocked back and forth, his arms were corpses, his eyes rolling away, his teeth falling off from his bones, he rocked in his knees, as the nurses laughed like hyenas in the savanna, as he could imagine lions all around him, seeing the big ice capped mountain in the distance, the heat making him sweat beads, the vultures circling in the sky, the zebras continuing to march in their little zigzagged lines.

Row row row your boat, gently down the stream…  
(Long drag of applesauce entering his body, and the corpse of a female patient)

Merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream…

The head surrounded him, in a black long pillar of shadow, its fangs open, saliva crawling down them, the forked tongue trying to escape, the slit eyes staring back at his empty sockets, and as he tried to escape from his long white luxurious jacket that was nearly choking him, he screamed, a long, hollowed, stifling scream that the moon even flinched as it heard it, flickering in the sky and almost giving itself up into the long silhouettes of God, the stars ready to fall from the sky like long drags of cocaine, long injections of heroin, ready to burn down the whole world, ready to make it burn, ready to make it alive by being dead, its own minutes of heaven.

The dragon opened his mouth wide, his black, bloodied, hollowed out mouth like a carpenter’s wood carving, and he struck him like a snake, swallowing him in one gulp, as he traveled down Satan’s throat, as he screamed long and loud that even the Acute Ward could hear him, that even the Chronics, Big and Tails and the other non-functioning patients, could hear him, and then he laughed, then he snickered, then he began to sing while rocking back and forth inside his stomach, smiling and full of happiness and warmth.

“Row row row your boat, gently down the stream…Merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream…”

The nurses stared onward at Sonic, locked in his own little prison, singing quietly to himself, restrained completely in a straitjacket, with a piss stain on the floor.  
“Give him a few more electroshocks, and maybe we can send him back to the Acutes.”  
“If he attempts suicide again, can we send him to the Chronics Ward?”  
“Why yes, of course. Because if he does so, that means he’s been a bad, bad boy. Like his little friend Miles was, for finding out the real reason our king made this world. If he ever tells anyone, we give him a lobotomy. If Sonic ever finds out too, the naughty, naughty hedgehog, then we’ll give him one too. Put a stake in his brain. That’ll show him. That’ll show him who the real ruler of this land is. And that’s the King of Spades.”

He imagined himself in that warm savanna, before sunset, with the hyenas watching and staring with their red blood lusted eyes, gazing at the cold mountaintop that looked so promising to his mind that was currently in flames, but his eyes, how leaded and shredded they were! And he soon fell asleep, his head resting where he pissed himself, blissfully unaware.

And he dreamed of dragons. The same one that he thought had swallowed him and his sanity whole.


	23. Christmas Eve

Time to tie up the knots  
Time to tighten all the loose ends  
If I told you this would be the last time  
I would say goodbye  
You wouldn’t believe me  
But even God  
Never believed  
A word I said  
And I never believed  
The words from Him

Either  
The rope gets tighter  
Around my neck  
The snake of vengeance  
As I say my last regrets  
You don’t believe me  
When this would be the first time  
I would say hello  
And I say hello  
To Hell

Choke my face until its black and blue  
Choke me until I have nothing left to lose  
This would be the last time  
I would say adieu  
Adieu to all the pretty people  
And the pretty things in life  
That got me down  
Because I realized I would never  
Be as pretty  
As them

The stars look down  
And they see that I am dead  
But they never see me up there  
Shining as my heart now seems  
Full of lead  
My body continues to float  
As I am the ghost of all  
My lies’ past  
Aren’t you glad  
That the world is one less  
Full of ugly people?  
Because I was one of them darling  
And you never realized  
That this is now the last  
Time I say  
Goodbye

He thought the poem he wrote was good. As good as he could get anyways, as he never was a writer in his life. But it didn’t matter now, because he was going to be dead, on Christmas Eve of 2007, the one that his parents told him would have so much promise, that it would be the best Christmas ever. They said that every year, but no, they were actually right this time, because this would be the year he would die and he would no longer have to deal with their shit-flinging Christmases from all of his relatives, them saying how much they wished for him to be a better man. Well, you couldn’t get much better than a dead man. Dead men told no lies and secrets. Dead men never could hurt you, until you saw the body, but hey, people get over that eventually, right? But they could never actually stab your back and watch it as it bleeds, like he’s done so many times in the past, to so many people.

He couldn’t hurt Josephine anymore. He couldn’t hurt anyone anymore if he was dead. With his lies and mistruths and bullshit, especially the secret that he couldn’t deal with inside of his head that continued to rot and bleed his brain. Something that his parents could never accept. And he would be like the rest of them. Homeless. Criticized, criminalized, even more than what he was already. Hated. Discriminated. He couldn’t take all of it no matter how much he wanted to chew. It was his time to die, and his time was here. Death was awaiting, the Black Beauty was awaiting, Satan was awaiting. Everyone he knew more than anyone else was waiting for him. And would they be glad to have his body floating in the air like a piñata that they could smack around. What a great party for all of the children in the world. They could smack him and see how black everything inside of him really was. It only took a few stabs. A few beatings of the stick.

He put the noose around his neck. He was standing on the chair, and he was preparing himself to just give it a little push.

He thought of his past life (the life he was all too willing to give up to just become a spirit and suddenly try to make it all right again like he saw in so many movies and TV shows. He wondered if that really was true and there really was no God or Satan.). He was an emotional child. He often screamed and threw tantrums and his parents sent him to a psychiatrist what seemed to be so long ago. The doctor was a quack. All doctors were quacks he thought. He never trusted them since he was a child, and he never trusted them now. He prescribed him Ritalin. Ah yes, Ritalin, the most abused fucking drug in the United States, given to children like candy. Sugar-coated pills that made you calm, made you taste the lemony sweetness when your mind no longer ran in laps, made you into a good student, a model student that everyone would love and want the candy too. Chocolate coated pills that you could give to any five year old child and they would immediately become more human. More normal. But children were supposed to be like nymphs. Doctors never realized that the world needed to retain its insanity, its wonder. Never play God with a patient, and let that patient remain a demi-god inside their head, a nymph, a Dorian Gray, an Ernest Hemingway who would soon die by the bullet unlocked by the barrel of the shotgun. They told him years later that his life would end like that. And he was glad. He took comfort by it. He didn’t want to be beaten by time. He didn’t want to be beaten by the weakening of his body, to be told that he wasn’t immortal. But immortals knew the only way to die was to die by their own hands. Whether it was holding a knife, a gun, a rope, pills, a plastic bag, the instruments of the soon to be mortals, the tools of the trade.

He would be donating his blood, his life, to the kingdom of Zeus, and he would become a constellation for all of the miseries he underwent. And when he was full of sorrow, he looked to the constellations for guidance, and he wondered how he could become one, to become the blue picture for everyone to see when they were full of tears, full of bubbling madness, and that was the main reason he wanted to kill himself today. He would become a work of art. He would become the next Vincent Van Gogh. He would become the next immortal god in the words of the beautiful people who thought that they knew all there was to know about art. To become forever ingrained in the minds of celebrities and the rich and all of the pretty fantastic beautiful people on the planet that everyone stared at with a thousand eyes, it was his dream. It was the only thing he knew he had to be. 

But in the end, constellations and gods and beauty and shit and wine? Who the fuck cared? It was time to die.

He thought he heard footsteps. But he thought that was his mind slowly choking under the rope, by the serpent of death, the medusa, the myths of the Greek Gods that was coming all crashing down on him and choking him and letting his mind rest and telling him that soon it would be time to become immortal hold the holy sword and become a messenger of God like Gabriel and tell the world that there was a new Jesus Christ a Jesus Christ that would end everything and make the world at peace because it would erupt in a tiny million pieces and he took solace in that and he smiled and he thought all the beautiful people had plastic smiles like him that burnt and rotted under the decay of the pressure under the decay of what we truly are as a species a pile of shit a pile of cells that led to truly nothing truly nothing mattered in this galaxy and the Black Beauty laughed and told him to come come with him to the galaxies he was the chosen one the chosen one led to lead the children of the sorroworific and the melancholic and the angry and the pained it was time for everyone who had pain the knife in their hearts the twist of the pumping of blood wrenching more black blood wrenching more and more until it got to the end of your back to DIE.

“Sonic! Sonic Thaddeus Seabrooks, stop that this instant!”

He couldn’t respond. The threaded snake continued to bubble his words and bubble his thoughts.

He could hear it rattling its rattler to all the children, the lonely sad children who needed his death to live.

“Sonic! Oh my God, Sonic, what is the meaning in this!”

“Stop, now!”

“Oh my God Pierson, we have to send him somewhere, we have to take him to the ER, he can’t do this on the holiest of nights! Oh my God, our little boy is in pain!”

So much goddamn pain he couldn’t take anything anymore and his words were rotting under the light.

“Do you know CPR?”

“Can we resuscitate him?”

“Is he dead?”

Maybe. He hoped so.

He thought he could see glowing lights in his vision. It was either the pearly gates, the entering of God’s kingdom, but it was red. The entering of the coal shit-stained bloodied kingdom, the kingdom of Hell.

“Does he have a Do Not Resuscitate Order?”

“Oh, God no!”

“Stand back then.”

The lights were comforting to him. He could feel euphoria crawling in his brain. It was the only good feeling he had in the entire year of 2007. He wanted to watch the red little demons dance on the walls, their little arrowed tails bouncing up and down and singing and talking in unison about what Satan thought about this nice little slab of meat that arrived on the grill.

The voices were dark, full of sorrow, and full of sick. They sounded like they had yellow phlegm inside their throats constantly, the choking of their words, the melancholy making their demonic sounds ring.

“What should we do with him, Pierson?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is he okay?”

“He’s conscious, but he seems to be somewhere else. When you don’t get a lot of oxygen your brain…”

He no longer had a brain. He no longer had a soul. They took it away. No longer did he had a conscious, no longer could God save him, he was Satan’s, his flesh and thoughts and mind belonged to the demons to feast upon. And he would suffer; suffer with pleasure that his suffering was less than the suffering in the world of the living.

“Make him breathe for God’s sake then!”

Why would the demons be talking about God? Why would they want him to live? No, the kingdom of Hell was a nice little place that he thought he could finally rest in, the fires from the pit roasting his cold gray heart.

He could feel one little demon rubbing himself against him. He could feel a pinprick. He hoped it wasn’t his cock.

“Jesus Christ, should we send him somewhere?”

“Do not take the Lord’s name in vain, Loria! I know this is a dire situation, but…”

“Oh for God’s sake, enough of that, I can say whatever I can to let you know that our son nearly died on Christmas Eve!”

“I say we should send him to Austin Lakes Behavioral Hospital…”

“But it’s nearly Christmas!”

“Then…”

“Then what?”

Then what indeed, as the demon smirked with his teeth rotted out with maggots and plaque and locusts as he could feel barbed wire inserting his asshole.

Okay, enough! I had enough of this! Let me live then, God! Let me live! I don’t want to be in Hell, God have mercy, let me be back with my parents who worship you and all of that shit, let me live goddamn it let me live!

His eyes saw blurs all around him, the shapes, the colors all out of their lines, until they began to be molded into things he recognized like clay. Furniture, people, lights, the colors of red beckoning him to come back, that he was here now and that he was alive and he was still immortal and he should lap up all the air like a half-dehydrated dog finally getting water, and his eyes were no longer dull but a brilliant magnesium burning green and he was here now, God almighty, he was here on Christmas eve, alive.

“Sonic…you’re alive?”

He nodded. “Unfortunately.”

But he was glad, that he wasn’t getting a cock full of acid in his ass anymore.

His mother hugged him tight, so tight he thought he would die again. “Oh baby…”

“If you really don’t want to send him to a hospital on Christmas, then just watch him for the night. Keep him on suicide watch, keep him busy during the holidays, and call me if he starts hurting himself again and we’ll send him via ambulance.”

He attempted suicide. And failed. For some reason, the word seemed strange in all itself. That it ringed to him, that it now had meaning to him after all these years, and he wondered if this made him into a new person under everyone’s eyes, that it made him into someone everyone would care about and love and no longer be hurt by their long tendriled nails of their thoughts.

His mother cried. He never saw her cry.

But yet he felt nothing but disease.

He could feel the Black Beauty roaming in with her black hooves and sharp eyes again.

“Thank you very much. You saved our son’s life.”

Unfortunately, he added.

He wondered what it was like to die.

He wondered what it was like to become a constellation. Like the rest of them.

His heart was full of sorrow. Cold and gray. And it only could be warmed by the pits of Hell.

“Son, do you have any idea how much hell you put us through today?”

Yes.

He did.

And he wished he could do it, all over again.

This is the first time  
I say hello  
To God  
This is the first time  
I say hello  
To you  
But this is the only time  
The only time  
I ever felt alive  
But that will quickly change  
My thoughts  
Are a black, tortuous ocean  
Full of death  
Full of regrets  
Full of me  
Not giving a shit  
When I finally tie the knots  
Tie all the loose ends  
And I say  
My final goodbye  
To the world that has  
Too much color  
To my black and white mind


	24. The Night Before the Moon Broke

The frost was gathering, the sides of their black striped windows cold and white. They supposedly turned on the heat in the hospital, but it was still cold, colder than it was outside. Bark was sitting on the mahogany red chair, reading A Christmas Carol (festive, he thought), and even with his large thick growth of fur, he still shivered underneath it. The radio and the television told all the patients that it was so cold the bottoms of your boots would be stuck in the sidewalk, a sickening sound echoing in your ear as you walked by Wonderland State Psychiatric Hospital, hearing the thick crunching of the snow from the boots of the spirit that wandered around the winter landscape, his face hidden by the sun that was making the snow look like as bright as the as the sun itself.

Its sister Snow a maiden that was able to steal the sun’s lights inside its crystal hands and blind anyone who walked near her. The maiden was a cruel bitch, Sonic thought to himself as he watched her drift to the winter wonderland outside, as she killed the bluebells and the dandelions that once dressed the hospital in a respectable garment, and now it was nothing but sleek silver, a man who looked as slender as the knife he carried, ready to cut you, ready to dissect you, ready to make you bleed and rot and throw you away. Wonderland was nothing but a charming man in a silver suit, asking you for a nice drink, and then he would take that knife in your throat and desiccate your entire body. The man who was behind it all wasn’t in his office today. He went on vacation, they said. He went to Turkey to try to cure everyone’s Dissociative Identity Disorder, he said. Did everyone in Turkey have DID?

Bullshit, he thought. Nothing but lies. Last time he saw him, he was wearing a silver tuxedo and he carried a hefty briefcase, possibly filled with all of his drawings, and he had a spring to his step as he walked away from the hospital, able to be free from the ugly, shattered place that was hidden so neatly by Maiden Snow’s crystal hands. It was in a place where no one could see their pain and suffering, their boredom and fatigue, their excuses and lies. It was all hidden in a neat little snow globe that Dr. Splinter could simply shake for more snow to come, and all would be quiet, except the patients inside it, wondering what shook them. It was only Satan, my dears. Only Satan.

How numb he was growing. How the boredom kept piling up. How his parents kept calling him about not being in church this December, on Christmas day, the day where Christ was born. To Sonic, no one important was born on Christmas. Only Coke Cola. Only advertising for the drink that can clean the insides of a car so great, that they named a figure after them, and his name was Santa Claus. And to him, Christ might have been as real as Santa: advertised everywhere, but with no rational theory as to where they live today if they were still alive in people’s hearts and souls. They say Santa lives in the North Pole, they say Jesus lives in Heaven, they say Sonic’s rationality was in a place where light could never glow and make it shine, and that might as well have been his asshole.

But yet, even if the outside was bright and scary and the snow had the same color as the monster’s fangs back in the world of Wonderland, Sonic wished. And that wish was that he wanted to go outside, in the cold, to feel the real wind on his face and the Snow Maiden’s hands, how cold and how hard they were, smell the smell of gasoline from the cars passing on by (that were just cleaned by Coke Cola, cleaned by the jolly old Saint Nick), see the gray mashed skies that looked like his mother’s wrinkled face, he wanted to see it all, and he wanted to feel it all, taste it all, he wanted to feel everything that Satan took away from him, and he was in this hospital, stuck for six months, wishing to taste reality on his parched tongue. This world, it wasn’t reality, but just a place that some said was only a place to rest, but he thought it was a place to die. While reality made you alive and well, and kept the doctors away, much like an apple should. One dose of reality a day, sent to you via pinprick, will make you alive and sane. And he laughed. His laughter rolled off his mouth and his throat and his stomach, rolling off to the halls of the hospital, quiet, cold, and smelling of Lysol, no one paying attention to him and his sudden bout of humor. They only paid attention to their own minds, their own games, their own bouts of what they found funny and their own insanity. They were all mad here. They were all glad to be stuck here. Stuck in a very frigid, white and dark green, lice infested hospital, for months, never tasting reality. And they wanted to smash the windows and taste blood for the first time too, and run free in the snow in only their socks.

He heard a sudden ding from the nurse’s office. There was suddenly a lot of chatter, a lot of laughing and joking and merriment to be made, when everyone else in this whole damned hospital was sad and alone and gray.  
“Did Dr. Splinter just say that the patients can be taken out?” they say, they say.  
“Yes, but we don’t know if that Sonic fellow who’s been in here for six months can come out and play.” And play echoed in his ears. And play.  
“He’s still suffering from the lows of his bipolar, correct? We can’t have him out of the hospital grounds, he’ll kill himself, and he’ll be slain!” Be slain. Be slain.  
Suddenly, there was a crickle and a crinkle, and they heard from their radios, that Dr. Splinter heard their whole conversation, and he thought Sonic could go out, oh! It was his lucky day! He needed to say thanks to God atop the steeple, his parents would say.  
“He’s been here for six months, so he deserves a little time away from here. He doesn’t need to be in this hospital all the time when he’s cleared to be out to get some sunshine. You do know that Sonic is cleared, right my ladies?”  
“No, that can’t be true!” they shouted in disdain, their voice full of medicinal liquor and hate. “You can’t send him out! If Sonic pulls any more of his shenanigans, he should be assigned to the Chronics or Disturbed Ward! Ward three, ward three!” they clamored and decreed.  
“But it’s important to make Sonic actually happy to be here. And you want him happy to be here, do you heed? Sonic shouldn’t be sent to ward three, not yet indeed, but he should go outside in the winter sun, he should be free!”  
And with another boom and crack, the voice went back inside Dr. Splinter’s mouth, and the nurses now knew what they would do with Sonic and the crew.

“Listen up, gentlemen and women!” one shouted to the corners of the hospital. Although she held a smile in her face, her voice was venomous, annoyed, and full of hate. “We will be making a field trip to the mall and the ice cream shop. But only some of you can go, as not all of you are approved by Dr. Splinter. That means Bark, Amy, Bean, Blaze, and…” She mustered all of the niceness in her soul to say his name. “…Sonic, you can come. The rest of you either haven’t stayed the full six months or you weren’t approved. Rouge, Nack, Knuckles, you have to stay here and continue your normal hospital activities.”  
“Now why in the hell I can’t come, while some pyromaniac gets to come with you and burn the goddamn mall down? I want to get away from this damn place too you know, and this isn’t helping my sanity or my damn behavior!” Nack growled, as he changed the station from classic rock to heavy metal. Whenever he changed it to heavy metal, Nack was angry. Sonic knew. Because he did this all the time.  
“We honestly don’t know why, Nack. I’m wondering why Dr. Splinter is letting him go too. But either way, you have to stay here, and maybe next time we schedule a trip, you can come with us. You just need to be on your best behavior and maybe Dr. Splinter and Robotnik will approve you one day.”

Nack said nothing more as he changed the station from heavy metal, the screams of Slayer hushed by Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama”. He thought the song always played on the radio about six times a day, but he was silenced, no longer wanting to raise a mutiny over going with them on some kind of Christmas trip.

“Any other questions before we leave? I hope you have a jacket when you were brought here, otherwise we’ll just have to provide you the lost ones over the years, and I’m sure you don’t want to wear a dead patient’s jacket, do you?”  
And she howled with laughter that crackled like fire. Sonic wasn’t sure why she was laughing so hard on something that seemed to be so serious, especially if she was making light of a serious issue that plagued Wonderland for years, but she only ushered them to wear their coats and sweatshirts, and they were led to the bus that was like the hospital (dark green and white) and they were driven off, to the Texas Mall.

 

—

The bus was eerily silent, the only sound droning in their ears were the sound of flies that migrated from the feces of cows to the spit and piss that accumulated in the bus for possibly years. He could smell it too. He imagined they used to have the Chronics in trips when they didn’t build the machine and made it work like perfection, and they would piss all over the seats and yell and scream about the second coming of Jesus. He wasn’t sure how Chronics were able to go on a trip anyways, but it was better than being in the darkness all of their lives, forgotten. The only thing he could remember of the Chronics that were here possibly on the date of August 5th, 1987, was the piss stain on his seat. The urine marked his territory. The urine was him. He was nothing but an insignificant, smelly yellow mark now. That was all people could remember this man by. If only Sonic knew the story behind every scent. But his sense of smell wasn’t that good, even being a hedgehog.

The outside looked so colorful to him as he looked beyond the window. Christmas decorations were everywhere in the city. Coke Cola was at it again with their marketing strategy, with their own personal Jesus. “Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas, and don’t forget to drink this soda that will make your insides rot!” He heard the jingling of bells as the Salvation Army volunteers ringed them, hoping to find donations, anyone willing to donate a penny. And every time someone did, they were wholly thankful, that their venture in the cold outside was worth it, because someone donated one cent to some cause he wasn’t completely sure actually helped people. His parents always donated. When he was a child they forced him to donate too. That was the only thing he could remember about them, his parents forcing him to cough up five dollars to donate to someone who really needed it. But he really needed it too. He was planning on trying to move away from his parents, so long ago…

“Sonic, Sonic, oh my dear Sonic!” they hollered and shouted and bounced up and down. “You must, you must! You must donate to the people who aren’t financially round! You can do it, you can do it, my dear old Sonic, I believe in you! Now donate, donate what you have found!”  
He looked at his money that seemed to be so small. He was looking to get a bicycle, to get away from them all.  
“But…I only have six dollars. Five dollars for helping you with the house, change that makes a dollar. That’s all I have and more,” he sound.  
“We don’t care about your dreams of going into New York, my dear boy!” his father said. “Just give the lady her money and we’ll give you something better to spend, the word of the Lord beckons you to do this.”  
Again he said with the Lord. The Lord always spoke through, as his father had no original mind of his own to borne. He was an empty carcass, a man with no soul, because the Lord always chose him, forever more.  
“But…I don’t have to if I don’t want to!” he would yell and fight. “You always told me to do whatever I think is right! And I think it’s right to hold off on these donations until next year! You two fear God more than anything, I wished there was something that wouldn’t make you that way!”

But even if he said no, he lost and he was broke, as he paid the donation of six dollars and twenty-three cents, now he had nothing, not enough to pay rent in the city of New York, however expensive that may have been.  
“You did the lord a good thing, my boy!” But there was no other appreciation, no “thank you” no “you’re a good man”, his money was stolen, by the Lord’s hands.  
God. How he still hated that word. What was He anyway? Someone who controlled whoever believed in him to act in his will, his sleight of his words and says, everyone believes him, now the world will shine in his own ray of sunshine, however faint it may be? Who knew, thought Sonic. No one knew who God really was. No one knew who Jesus really was. Just ancient texts and decrees. It was the seed of evil, he thought, to all the world’s people’s minds being so feeble.

The bike was never bought. He never went into New York. He wasn’t sure what caused him to think he wanted to go to the city with the golden lights shining everywhere, the Big Apple, but he thought maybe he had a chance at being a famous actor, even if he was so young. But he wasn’t shallow enough. Only men and women who wanted to go to acting and were successful had no personalities of their own, so they took another character’s, another soul’s, voice and mind. He believed everyone in Hollywood was evil; they were fascist pigs who believed the world should be all about them, all about the entertainment industry, even if all it wanted to do was “entertain” and fascinate the minds of men. So it garbled the same garbage everyday, expecting everyone to eat it up, like the pigs they were, and while he never ate the oatmeal it served up, there always was a purple weasel who did, saying that he “ate worse things”. That was the media. The media ate worse things. Like the deaths of children and racism.

"We’re here! Everyone line up in a single file and don’t try to run off somewhere, because if you do, you will not go on another trip for a long time, and that could be weeks, months, even years if you’re unfortunate enough.”  
He saw the snow peaking on top of the mall building, like a soft white hat, while many people were crowding in and out to do their Christmas shopping, their mass marketing, their way to make the economy not suffer anymore for just a few more moments. It was just like the medicine they would serve. It would only work for such a short time, then they were back to the souls they used to been, alone and suffering. Alone and gray.

He looked at the others. Amy and Blaze were constantly looking down, Amy at her stomach that he knew she hadn’t eaten in a long time, Blaze wondering if anyone was going to hurt her or rape her, so she tried to not meet everyone’s eyes. Bark was silent, as always, wishing he could go back to The Christmas Carol, as he didn’t like reality too much, and preferred the company of books. Bean constantly hobbled up and down, constantly looking, constantly searching as they walked outside in the snow to make a snowball to hit anyone, to cause a little discord and chaos, but once the staff warned him of going away from the group, he followed, his eyes met with the great pine tree in the center of the mall, decorated with little plastic ornaments of toy soldiers drumming and marching, and the ribbon that shined under the store’s golden lights in a display of silver and blue. The silver tuxedo it was wearing to make sure everyone knew everything was fine. He thought this might’ve been what Christmas was all about.

—

Sonic thought of the first days of Christmas he spent with Josephine as he browsed the store, looking at the shiny gemstones that caught Blaze’s eyes, the golden topaz and the blue ocean of the sapphire that stretched on a shiny silver ring. They were warm near the fire, thinking of all the days they spent together, the days they loved each other, the gift that Sonic was close to giving her, the shiny golden ring that would signify their bond, their relationship. It was neatly tucked away in the small velvet blue package as they sat near the television set that his father painstakingly worked to pay for, and he thought that he painstakingly worked for this golden ring too, and that he hoped she would appreciate it, or else he would simply just sell it in the pawn store less than what he paid for. Gold was low in supply they said. They needed to recycle it, gargle it in a machine, and melt it down to make more gaudy jewelry for all the Hollywood actors who simply deserved it all, because they were shallow enough for the whole world to care about them and give them everything in the world, even all the world’s precious resources. They had the green, so give them the gold and silvers and diamonds. Green was all that mattered in this world, because there was much bluer than green, and with enough of it the blue would fade away.

“Sonic, do you remember the day we first met? The first time our hands touched? Do you remember the first time we kissed, the first time we fucked? Well, there wasn’t a first time in that Sonic my boyfriend my solace, but I hope there will be someday, so I won’t be the only virgin in my school’s populace.”  
He sipped his cocoa, and said nothing. The fire was warm, the tree was green, he thought there were no problems, it was just her and he. His parents weren’t here, they were away to church, and he thought there wasn’t a luckier hedgehog than the one in Shitville, Might As Fucking Will Be in Fucking Tennessee.

“Sonic, I want you to kiss me again, by the fire, stroke my hair, tell me I’m beautiful, love me, move me, tie me to a chair and make me your captive, otherwise, our life would be dull, and missing of the lover’s passion.”  
He sipped his cocoa, and said nothing. Two and A Half Men was on the telly, the colors blurring in their faces, the little slip of lime green, their pink traces so brightened on the screen. He thought if he had to stare at this television any longer, the one his father bought so long ago that he refuses to replace, he wanted to scream, and he wanted to fall into a deep fit of rage!  
“What’s wrong, Sonic? Afraid of a little lace? Afraid of bras, breasts, and being risqué?”  
“No, it’s not that,” he said, the shadows covering his face. “We’re not ready. That’s it. That’s plenty. Plenty of reasons to not have sex. I don’t want it, I don’t want the rest. Just enjoy this moment, watching some mediocre sitcom, look at these actors, their faces are literally shitbombs! Explode with the feces and the lies, sometimes I really want to die!”

“Of course you don’t want to die.” She pouted, her lips red like a cherry pie. “But I want you to be with me, come on my love, let’s fly away, let’s fly away and escape to another day, another time, another place! We don’t need to be here anymore, just looking at Charlie Sheen’s fluorescent face! Look at how green, look at how pink, look at how everyone in this whole damn world is fake! Except you and me, we’re meant to be, we’re meant to escape, we’re meant to pace, for the ultimate in lovemaking, the ultimate in euphoria, the ultimate in a race to be the most forgotten people in this whole damn world!”  
His fingers clasped hers, but they were never curled. He winced, he flinched, as she bit him, her fangs sinking deep into his skin, a pinch, a big black ditch that needed to be stitched.  
“Stop it! Stop it right the hell now!” he yelled and hollered. “I don’t want to know you any longer! It hurts, I don’t want you doing that again, help me in whatever is out there I don’t thinking about giving you a lynch!”  
“What the hell, are you talking just like Doctor fucking Seuss? What the hell is a lynch?” miss little ol’ Josephine pitched.

“It’s a furry creature, with six arms and six legs that has thick black fur and thick black fangs. He has wide black eyes and wide black lies, as he bites your head off, and you’re convinced that he’s just like the regular guys. He can do that you know. He can do that and more.”  
“Shut up! Shut the hell up you piece of shit!”  
And his coldness was fixed, as his heart grew three sizes that day, as he gave her a quick peck to her bra’s lace, but nothing more than one second, nothing less than a pathetic beckon, his heart feigned to escape, and they were silent, as the moon began to sink, and that left them a lot of time to think.

Oh how he loved her so.

Oh how he loved to lie to himself.

The swarms of people around the mall shopping and gawking and talking were surrounding him, in a sea of black. The men and women around him all wore the same color on their suits and dresses, not the silver that he once saw on the tree and on Dr. Splinter and on the hospital. Just a dark sodden black. A color that many didn’t wish to see. It meant a pit, it meant death, it meant The End, how he could remember the dandelion field and the cliff that led to a chasm that made his mind break. They walked by him, ignoring him, as if he was insignificant. A worthless patient coming from a worthless hospital was nothing to these self-important men and women, with their black suitcases and their black ties and their black long slender beaks, their needles full of a black substance, and a black hedgehog he was all so familiar with, the only one he could plainly see in the black charades as he wore a quilt of red over his eyes, and he sighed while the people surrounded him, the Christmas music suddenly turning from “Santa Baby” to the Scottish orchestra of bagpipes, as if he was led into another country, another world, where black was the only color, where death was the only thing that happened, and even if he wore a veil of blood red, he said to him as he leaned closer and closer to him, his hands reaching out, nearly touching him, nearly feeling the ghostly apparition and his fake fur and his fake chest and his fake smile: “Phony. You always were a phony. You always were a faker. A pseudo. You never were the real man you wanted to be. And that’s what’s important, right you blue doofus? Sometimes I wish I could be a deaf mute. Sometimes you wished you could be accepted. And I’m afraid you’re going to have to fight for that, phony. I’m afraid you’re just going to fight for that with every inch of your life, the skin of your soul, and I can only say, ‘I told you so’.”

I told you so; the black and red hedgehog frowned with malice. I told you so, it’s not too late! You can be like Alice, lost in a labyrinth, wondering where to sprint, but you can just kill the mad hatter and drink his mercury-rimmed hat, and you can be loony, loony as a bat!  
I told you so, it’s not too late, go back to your home, your God blessed place, in the home of the United States! Texas is a lone star, and so are you. You’re a blue shining star, and stars cannot allow themselves to be insane, as they fly in the sky, and their wings are made of methane, and they drift towards their freedom, where you’re free to gain a new face.

His chest rose, taking in a gasp of breath. He was with the group, looking at more items the mall had to offer, and there was no Shadow, no men and women completely wearing black, and the radio was playing “Jingle Bell Rock”. There were no bagpipes shrieking their droning voices. It might as well have been a fading daydream. He forgot that he only managed to sleep for three hours last night. Maybe he was tired. Maybe he imagined everything. After all, he was a patient, a patient who was somehow in the world of Reality, looking at sunglasses with a stick thin girl who was ready to be burned by the pyromaniac that disappeared like a flame with no breaths of oxygen in his blue lungs, the girl who was ironically named “Blaze” because she was set to burn everything much like the goddamn pyromaniac, and Bark, who was ready to burn by them as well. He was a tree, standing and mute, only listening to the whispers of the wind. Him.

“Ma’am!” The nurses were stopped by the mall security guards, looking to be the only men wearing black in the entire mall, their bulletproof vests hanging over their body, making them exhausted as they chased the pyromaniac, the green duck with the red scarf around his neck, holding a match that was blackened, as the flames he was obsessed with, the beautiful orange, blue, and yellow glow, was sickened away to ashes. “I believe this man belongs to you. He tried to burn down the Christmas tree in the center of the mall, before we stopped him and had to use force to get him to comply with us. Never let him in this mall again, ma’am, or the rest of your crazy lunatic patients. There’s a reason why they’re locked up, and that’s because they should never disrupt anyone who’s of peace of mind, shopping just to get something for their children! We shouldn’t have to pay for their mistakes in life!”  
But yet they did. They were paying for the mistakes in the entire industry of this damn mall. Every single one. Their children might as well have been called mistakes too. Most of them were.

They shoved the duck back into the group, Sonic only noticing that he was in front of him, cursing to the nurses and kicking and shoving his way back to the Christmas tree, only to be stopped by the policemen’s thick arms. “I want to burn it! I want to burn it all down! To make this place dazzle in color! Make it sparkle and shine! Make it red and orange and yellow and blue and maybe even green! Jingle bells, sulfur smells, nurse Merryworth took a shit!”

The nurses were at a loss, without their old friend, Thorazine, the friend that Sonic was beginning to know so well. Nurse Merryworth, her face red and flushed from Bean mentioning her name about the thing she grew to hate when she started working as a nurse in the hospital (both brown and metaphorical shit from all the patients), lifted Bean with her arms under his armpits and he screamed and flailed and dropped the match that he wished would make the entire hospital become a painting that he thought the whole world would enjoy as a delicate masterpiece, and she shouted even if her voice was always full of cheeriness like the rest of them, “Get back on the bus, Bean! You’re not going to be in a single trip like this for as long as you live! We’re taking you back!”

The swarms of people that once invaded the mall were becoming smaller, as he once saw the white sugar coated bushes and sidewalks again, the cold air chilling him as they forced Bean inside the bus, hollering that Christmas was a holiday that needed to be burned down to the ground. Down with Christmas! Down with Coke Cola and Santa Claus! Down with Jesus!

He would’ve agreed, but he didn’t wish to encourage him, especially when the nurses’ faces looked like red peaches, signaling to Dr. Splinter again, the man with the silver suit, who was on vacation to cure everyone in the world of having multiple personalities. Sybil couldn’t have a worse doctor. Hers was worse enough.

“Dr. Splinter, come in! We tried to take Bean to go out for a trip, and he tried to burn down the Christmas tree in the mall! We can’t stand for this behavior anymore, this is what exactly happened last time when you said he should go out for a trip, and you let him try to burn down the whole place! We know you’re the head doctor and you possibly know what’s best for Bean, but we’re seriously doubting your advice and we’re thinking of taking him back to the ward…”  
“That won’t be necessary,” he stated, his voice cold and uncaring to hear the nurses’ struggles. “You’re out there anyways, just let him have some ice cream with the others and don’t ruin everyone else’s fun. Gas is expensive; I’m sure you can’t just drive him back to the ward and go on the trip with the rest of the patients. You know our hospital is beginning to be a little low on funds and that’s the reason we don’t even plan those damn trips very often…”

“But Splinter! He nearly succeeded in burning down a mall and causing a fire! If he wasn’t already committed, then he would be thrown in jail, and he could’ve hurt or kill someone! We must take him back; he’s dangerous for the outside world! He’s too unstable!”  
As were the rest of them. Too unstable to face the world, the world outside of the white and dark green walls. A world Sonic would forget about if he wasn’t on the trip. He missed it, and he hoped they would take them for some damn ice cream at least, whether Bean was a crazed, dangerous pyromaniac or not.  
“Just let him have something fun once in his life, Merryworth! Bean has been locked in that ward for nearly a year! Once you’re done taking him and the rest of them then I won’t have him on these trips anymore if he’s still a danger to himself or others.”  
Her face was now pale, much like the snow outside of the bus. She didn’t expect Splinter, their god, their man, to say that Bean, a now dangerous patient, was allowed to roam the outside world whenever they let him, attempting to burn everything down. She was considered a kind, thoughtful nurse, but she couldn’t bear the thought of any of these patients killing or maiming someone, much like Bean did in the past. That poor man who was burnt to ashes by Bean. He now couldn’t think of having a normal job, be a productive member of society like everyone else, and she could imagine him crying by his bedside every night, with his nearly cremated face.

“You seem to be quite lenient, Dr. Splinter,” she replied sternly. “I will follow your orders for now, but if any of these patients you allow to go for one of these ventures do manage to hurt someone, you’re going to be sued, and I swear I won’t stand for it! I won’t be sued and I won’t be responsible for the death of an innocent person because I followed your haphazard guidelines! Goodbye Dr. Splinter, and hopefully you’ll learn your lesson when the inevitable day does happen that you’re responsible for someone getting hurt!”  
“Merryworth.” He was still on the line, possibly desperate, waiting for another answer from her, and his voice sounded hurt. Small. “Merryworth.”  
“Yes? Yes? That’s all you have to say for yourself? That’s all you have to say for letting these dangerous criminals out in this world? I require an explanation for why you’re doing this for the general public, Dr. Splinter, and I won’t tolerate any excuses.”  
“Merryworth. That won’t be necessary.”  
“No? And why not?”

There was a brief moment of silence. Merryworth was close to hanging up the line, as the doctor was so quiet for what seemed to be so long, then he spoke in the most vile, most disgusting voice that the nurse had ever heard.

“Because you’re fired. Never talk to me that way again to your boss, Merryworth, or you’ll never get a job that way. Good luck getting another job that gives a meager paycheck to help support your three children you lost custody of because you used to been an alcoholic passing out on the lawn every single night. Goodbye.”

And the line was dead, Merryworth holding onto his last, venomous words that spewed like a cobra baring its fangs. Her eyes were wide, and her hands shook as she held the receiver, then she threw it across the bus, the insides of it breaking and Sonic seeing the colorful web of wires and chips all over its body. Merryworth, the nurse that once took care of them, was as broken as the device. And he knew the day was just brimming with madness, as even the nurses, who were usually calm and happy, were mad too. This was Dr. Splinter’s job, to turn anyone into a shit-filled bag that had no logic inside their heads, only that they should react with the emotions so high, that they often wished that they were dead.

“Just get these damn hooligans to the ice cream shop and then take them back home! You might as well hurry up and bring them back to the ward, because I have to leave for home and take a glass of fucking champagne when I’m through this mess.”

And with a few single sentences, Dr. Splinter stripped a woman of all her pride and made her into an angry drunk that was no longer professional about the way she hid her disease. And Sonic thought this wasn’t the first time this happened. There were probably many more that were stripped, completely naked to the bare bone, many more brought down, and he thought someday, he was going to be one of them.

—

“And what kind of ice cream would you like, hedgehog?”  
He might as well choose wisely, because this was going to be the only thing that was going to taste good in his mouth ever since he was admitted.  
“Rocky road, please.”  
He glanced at the bopping and bouncing green duck, who just got a scoop of mocha flavored ice cream with a few small pieces of cheesecake inside. The ice cream shop warned that the mocha ice cream was made with real coffee, and that it would possibly make the “little ones” hyper if you weren’t a responsible adult. Bean was the little one, and the hospital staff weren’t responsible adults, especially ever since Dr. Splinter humiliated one of the nurses to go back to her old job: drinking vodka and spritzers and puking all over her porch where her three children will see what she had last time for her dinner with her minimal wage paycheck, probably McDonald’s.

He sat down with the others, Bark with a death by chocolate and Amy and Blaze with kid sized mint chocolate chips. Amy slowly licked the ice cream, while gazing at her small stomach. She was worried that only one small scoop was going to make her puff up and become as big as Bark, or even as big as Big. Blaze simply stared at the neon EXIT sign in the end of the shop, until he thought her eyes were going to fry away.

“Hey Bark. Hey Bark, hey Bark, hey Bark.” Bean tried to get his attention, constantly shuffling and squirming in his seat. “What are you going to do for Christmas, huh huh huh? What are you going to do for Christmas? Fuck that withered old bat that you’re always with? Are you going to fuck her, huh huh huh?”  
He could see that Bark grimaced, but he tried to remain calm. Obviously to him he said something that hurt him deeply, as if the bat he always saw who smelled and looked to be about twice her age was his best friend. Maybe.  
“How about you calm down? Settle your ass down the chair and just eat your ice cream.”  
“Oh, so you did fuck her, huh? While the staff weren’t looking? Ooooh! So does the staff not care if we have sex with someone? In that case, can I fuck you, Blaze?”  
Blaze’s face was ripe, a deep shade of red, when she blushed and stared down at the floor. She hated that word. Fuck. She wished it would be permanently banned. She wished whoever said it would have their heads completely off their necks and dead.

“Hey, how about you shut the fuck up, Bean? Don’t say that shit to her, or any of the other girls for that matter! Jesus Christ!”

His composure was ruined in only a few seconds. He wished he could strange Bean right now, to never say that to any of these women, to not even call Rouge a “withered old bat” when he thought she was more beautiful than anything he would ever set his eyes on again in the entire hospital, but as the table shook with his large fist, Bean was silenced for a few moments, gazing into his ice cream cone that was half-eaten, half giving him enough energy that caused him to be this crazy.

“Hey buddy, I thought we were friends! I thought we did stuff together, you know, hang out and shit! I never thought there would be a day when you would be an asshole to me!”  
“Well, you know what Bean? I never was your friend. I felt sorry for you because no one else in the whole damn hospital could stand to be with you, not even that asshole Nack, so I thought I could stand you because there are a lot of weird people out there that I can stand. But you’re a goddamn annoying mole on the side of everyone’s ass today, are you? All you care about is yourself and fucking fire, that’s all you talk about! Nice job getting us kicked out of the mall and trying to burn that Christmas tree by the way, I was planning on getting a Christmas gift for someone and you fucking blew all my plans! Made it go to flames you should say, so you should masturbate because I mentioned fire! There you go!”

Bean lunged towards him, the table crashing into the floor. Sonic held onto his Rocky Road ice cream as the other four, the mocha, the death by chocolate, the two mint chocolate chips, were splattered on the floor, included blood from the side of Bean’s mouth when Bark delivered a punch that nearly cracked his jaw. He fell, just like the table, and the ice cream man pointed to the door as the nurses hurried onto the scene, saying, “Get out, all of you! I will remember to never let any psychiatric patients inside my shop ever again! Just leave, I don’t even care if you finished your ice cream or not or even if you paid for it!”

The nurses held Bean, who was crying uncontrollably as the side of his face stung and bled, the nurses trying to soothe him of his pain as another scolded Bark, who was listening, but not caring much for her concern on being banned by yet another store and that he was going to be stuck in the hospital again for another six months. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “My mom is probably fucking dead already anyways because of you assholes leaving me here.”

Sonic sighed. It was all he could say as a response. He only wanted to be free for a short moment and instead he was tied up with chains even more, even more restrained. For the rest of the trip, the bus was entirely silent as they drove back up to the ward, everyone too busy to look outside as the light turned to night, as the shades of black and blue began to glow a little gold, and Sonic imagined himself holding the golden ring he was going to give to Josephine, the ring that he promised would tighten their bond.

And he sighed again, and the snow fell quietly around his body as he stepped down the steps of the bus, the snow squelching under his feet, the screams of the patients who died so long ago still in his mind. And before he could open his eyes wide again, they were back inside the dark green and white walls, the Acute Ward, and the nurses treated Bean and Bark complied with taking his Xanax, and they scolded them and told them they won’t go on another trip with them for a very long time. Not for another year.

And he fell asleep. He had enough madness for one day.

 

—

It was the night before Christmas, and it was quiet all throughout the ward  
Not a creature was stirring, not even Bean, who fell asleep with a roar of “Fuck you whores!”  
The medication table was sealed with great care  
In hopes that the patients in the hospital would be there  
And swallow the pill  
That would cure their ills

The Acutes were nestled all snug in their beds (with a belt and wires and thread)  
While visions of entering Reality danced in their heads  
And the nurses with their uniforms, and Dr. Splinter with his silver suit  
Had just settled their mostly normal brains to close the institute  
“None of the patients are getting out this year!” he jeered  
“None of them are even going to find out who it is they should fear!”

When out on the lawn, with the dandelions and the bluebells that were rotted, there was a clatter  
And Sonic saw near his bed on the floor there was something red on the floor that splattered  
Away to the dayroom he ran in the speed of light  
He wondered why he needed to be awakened with such a fright

The lunatic moon laughed as God sprinkled his sugar coated snow  
Gave the lustre, the shades of red and yellow to the objects below  
When, what to his wondering eyes should appear  
But a large man, and eight gaping cuts that seemed to sear

With a black face, so shadowy and murked  
He knew in a moment, it was his old pal Smirk  
More rapid than his heart the nurses they came  
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them names!

“Now Slut, now Cunt, now Whore, now Dyke Who’s Poor!  
“On Hooker, on Motherfucker, on, on Sugartits, on Whiny Bitch!  
“To the top of my dick, you can suck it! To the top of your face, I will punch it!  
“Now run! Run you all! Run to the top of my balls!”

As he looked to the window to see the white glazed snow fly  
As the moon was covered by the storm, the shard of glass that cut them, so high in the sky  
So out of the door, the moon glazed pieces shatter, the man with no face flew  
With his bag full of drugs, and the needle that had Thorazine too

And then in the sparkle of the night he heard a scream in the balcony  
The clicking and whirring of the machines, ready to devour another man with such a malady  
As he saw the colors become vivid in his vision, he turned around  
Down the halls Dr. Splinter came with a bound

He was dressed like the moon, from his head to his foot  
And his clothes were tarnished with blood, shit, and soot  
A bundle of medicines, from Ativan to Zyprexa he had flung on his back  
And he looked like a drug dealer, just opening his pack

His face how it had nothing! His dimples nowhere to be found!  
His cheeks were like the man’s suit, so lurid, looking like they were his feathery down!  
His fangled mouth was drawn like a spiral  
And the small sparkle of his eyes was like the flames coming from the duck pyro!

The stump of a cigarette he held tight in his teeth  
And the smoke it encircled his head like the cooking of meat  
He was a man who had no features at all, but he had a thin belly  
That hacked when he laughed, his lungs full of black jelly

He was a tall and lanky, a powerful, wicked demon  
And he laughed when he saw him, his mind, oh the madness it was beamin’!  
A grin of his mouth and a twist of his head  
Soon gave him to know that he was a creature to dread

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work  
And filled all of the medicine cart, then Dr. Splinter surprised him with a lurk  
And stabbing him with the steak, his chest full of not darkness but blood  
The only thought that echoed in Sonic’s head was “Run run RUN!”

He fell with a shout and a scream  
Sonic kept pinching himself, trying to make himself realize it was a dream  
But he heard him exclaim, ‘ere he soon dissolved in the light  
“Have a very merry goddamn fucking Christmas, and to all a good fucking night! Now go fuck yourself before I put these drugs way out of sight!”

—-

And then it was Christmas morning before he could blink.

He tried to think of what happened, but nothing came up. Except that Santa came, and they were given a present: more drugs. More medicine. He wasn’t sure what was so different from the medicine than before, but Sonic thought he didn’t want to find out. He only stared at the snow that was falling to the earth, the white blanket that covered a dead body that lied before him, the man’s cold casket.

And he wished that it was him.


	25. The Day All Hope Died Away

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: The lyrics used in this song are from “The Day the World Went Away”, which was written by Nine Inch Nails. I do not own this song or any other properties of Nine Inch Nails.

His father, the one who cared about him, the one who gave an effort in raising him, the one who was there when his mother died of a cause he wasn’t so sure about (as she died before he could remember, possibly when he was 2 years old), the one with the hard-set eyes of iron gold and a face that was stern and a fang that was overgrown and reached the side of his face like his old official trademark, he knew his father cared, he knew his father was a good father, he knew it was entirely his fault he became this way as a criminal, but he hated him either way. It seemed like ever since he learned how to walk his father made him work. He didn’t much believe in child labor laws. He thought if a child was born unto this world, they were born to work, and they were born to try to make a living out of their supposedly candy-eating and see-saw and sandbox playing days. Once he was out of school it was time for work, as he made him work in his own textile mill factory, off in Temple, Texas. He hated it, as it smelled strange of smoke and dyes, and even when he dreamed he could imagine himself spinning the yarns, of his father telling him of the cotton they had to pick in the dreaded inferno-blazing Texas sun that glared in his eyes as he touched every cotton plant, of the yellow fields that he thought strangely looked like dehydrated piss. He thought to himself every time he went to work that children shouldn’t have to work at his age. He was 10 years old. His life was merely beginning. And it was beginning with the weaving of fabric, as he dyed it red and blue and green and he smelled cotton and smoke and he could hear his father yelling over the machines, “Nack, damn it, you’re doing this wrong! Here, let me show you how it’s done. I wonder if my own son can do this job as well as me one day, but it doesn’t seem likely. You keep working at it, Nack. You keep working on it and maybe I’ll promote you. But you need a lot to work on it before you get that pay raise. Come on Nack, hurry up, we ain’t got all day!”

His father never wanted to hit him, but the force of his criticisms was enough to hurt. On some days, he said he couldn’t do anything right. That the future of Warwyk’s Textile Industries Incorporated were falling on his barely green shoulders, and that he better work harder, work faster, or else he will never be as good as his father, he will never take care of the company if he continued to work the way he did.

But he was only 10. He still had school to worry about. He still had to keep up with his friends. He wanted to do other things that normal kids did, like play videogames or have sleepovers or play in playgrounds or going to the forest and picking up salamanders from rotting logs, like he always wanted to do in the woods next to them, but his father forbid him from going there, that no work and all play would make him a very stupid and lazy boy, as he continued to nonchalantly dye the clothes, not caring of what his son felt, the son who just had his mother die eight years ago, who still couldn’t get over it, who still couldn’t understand if his father understood of the car accident he told his mother had died in, off the highway to Dallas, of what it felt to his soon blackening heart as it was sickened and infested with maggots and worms over the years. 

His father barely told him good things about him. Always he was lazy, barely a hard worker, his schoolwork could be much better with A pluses even if he thought it was hard enough just trying to get a B and paying attention to the teachers, he tried everything to please his father, but he was never impressed, he only pressed him down further in the ground, in hopes that the constant criticism and the constant battering of his self-esteem would make him into a man, much more mature than the other kids, a smart child who would succeed in academics and go on to Harvard and maybe get a PhD or a Master’s Degree, like his father never did, as he was forced to work all his life by his father, as his father was constantly stressed and overwhelmed by the Great Depression, and he beat him with belts and called him a no good son of a bitch, and when Nack’s father was now in charge of the textile factory and renamed it to Warwyk’s, his own father shot himself, without saying goodbye, without saying that he loved him. Warwyk tried to remain a strong man, and he wished Nack would be the same, after their mother, Magdalene, suddenly died one night on October.

Nack wished she was still alive, even if he couldn’t remember her voice and what she looked like except having blue eyes and brown hair. Maybe things would’ve been much more different. But nothing could change the past now. He was here in this textile factory, working from 3 to 9:30 pm, his hands constantly red from the dye, his fur having little tufts of cotton attached to him. He thought as he worked all those years, until he was about 14, he would hate cotton for the rest of his life. Sometimes he even refused to wear cotton shirts. But when he was 14, he completely changed. Nack soon lost his care for the world and his concern of keeping up a professional appearance and being the man that his father always wanted to be. It wasn’t long before his father found out that Nack began to cut classes from school. Getting detentions and suspensions. He even smoked cigarettes and liked them and always carried a pack of Marlboros around him. He smoked weed a few times with some friends too. Whatever was going to make him forget about that fucking factory and his fucking father and his fucking mother being dead in the ground 12 fucking years ago without remembering much about her. Nack sometimes even put firecrackers in cats’ asses and watched them yowl in pain, thinking it was a funny way to spend his time when he wasn’t at school and he wasn’t at work. Sometimes he went to the forest (even when his father still forbade him) and smashed frogs with rocks just to see what they looked like with their blood and organs all over the place. Teachers recommended Nack to see a psychologist. They said he was beginning to show sociopathic tendencies, that he sometimes liked to see students who never harmed him in the first place break down and cry in front of him, that sometimes he liked being disruptive in class and sometimes he wouldn’t come to class at all and just sit outside and smoke. Despite the teacher’s constant warnings that if he didn’t put that cigarette out he would be suspended for a week, he only laughed, and only blew the smoke in their face, then usually he left the school grounds, thinking he was lucky he was out of school for a week. His father, while he punished Nack by making him work more hours at the factory, made him go nowhere else but the house and warned him against the dangers of going out in the middle of night, as night was often the time of sin and the time of murder, but he knew he was increasingly growing helpless for what he could do to make his son a good boy. He didn’t much cared for doctors that had dealings with the mind, and refused to believe that his own son, his own flesh and blood, was becoming the same type of person as serial murderers and criminals. He wanted his son to be a man, a respectable, hard-working man much like he and his own father was, but Nack was slowly growing distant, slowly becoming closer to the life of sinners and killers, and he was only 14, the age where people still considered you as a kid. Still considered you young and bursting of life, full of things to learn and understand, but Nack hardly wanted to understand anything but of how much money he would need for cigarettes and Xanax, as his job didn’t seem to pay him too much as his father continued to cut his pay for being a bad boy, but he didn’t care. He knew he could get more money by stealing. He knew he could get more money by selling his father’s valuables. He knew he could get more money by being a bully around the children at his school, beating them up and taking all of the cash they had in their pockets, to feed his constant hunger for the little yellow pills and the green leaf that made him forget things for a while, made him forget of his father, and made him forget of that he had a job to do by the time he got out of school, at 3:30 pm, but he didn’t care at all for that, as his father never cared for him, and he would never care for his own real son, the textile factory that continued to loom and laugh at him with its steely lungs, with the fumes blasting in his nose of dye and burnt cotton, and he thought he would rather smell of the stench of weed instead of the stench of failure, of constant disapproval and disappointment.

And as he rode his bike in the sepia air, the stench of dye and cotton still hanging onto him (even if he was wearing a polyester shirt just to avoid even thinking of cotton being stuck on his body), he thought he could see bright violet eyes in the distance. He thought maybe it was simply someone playing with the lights or someone installed two purple bulbs on their front porch like rednecks in Texas are known to do thinking they scared burglars and thieves and cousins entirely drowned in meth to steal their Civil War antiques (and not be able to tell the difference between a Confederate flag made in the Civil War era or one made in the 2000’s, unaware of how it made Nack look to these people who own these things less as a human being but as idiots that just formed right out of the primordial ooze), but as he rode further, he thought he could see two irises peeking, belonging to a little girl with white pale fragile hands with a pale fragile dress ornate with blue much like precious china, as her eyes seek him, and whispered as breathlessly as possible, “It’s time to take your medicine.”

It’s time to take your medicine, Mr. Seabrooks…

He could see the violet eyes gaze at him again, waiting and watching for him to wake up, to take his own medicine again, the shock of lightning that was supposed to realign his brain, but only made it die away. They felt like stabs in his head, as it continued to throb as if the knife was still attached that seemed to be so small in this little yellow-stained world he was in, wanting to hold his head with the quills that were dirty and smelled faintly of piss, but he was inside a straitjacket, one made of leather that nearly crushed his lungs and made it a struggle to breathe, his entire body feeling restrained and locked away. His feet were still free, but they couldn’t make the pain in his head go away. But he could walk around the cell he was in, observe the ward, and maybe even beg the nurses to let him be free of his restraints, as he got his shock therapy, he should be allowed back in the Acute Ward, they could simply lead him back to the black door at the edge of the sun-streaked hallway and he would be ripe and ready to go with his bipolar managed and he would never have to have another electroshock therapy again. Wasn’t that right, Sonic Thaddeus Seabrooks? Wasn’t it right that he would be out of here in no time?

If only life was like that, little hedgehog. If only.

He felt powerless as he sat in the cell with the lone window that was stroked by the sun. He could still hear the patients yelling and moaning and flailing and dancing about in their cells, with slobber and snot in their faces and beards and with blood on their hands and wrists and some also in restraints, shrieking, “Let me out! Let me out of this hell! Let me out! Let me out!” while shaking their heads as if they would roll off like a fragile china doll handled by a cruel child. The pungent smell came back to him, the smell of shit and blood and the janitors attempting to clean it all with their Lysol and bleach, and he wished he could pinch his nose, he wished he could move his hands and scratch an itch on his body, he wished he could breathe, and he wished that he didn’t have to stay here any longer than he had to, because the patients weren’t completely insane: it was hell inside here. They were sane enough to understand that.

All he could do was rock back and forth to not bore himself. He could also talk and sing, but he couldn’t hear himself in all the cacophony. He wondered how being in these straitjackets made anyone saner: you couldn’t do anything but be insane in them, by rocking constantly as if he was traumatized and singing songs just to keep himself company and not alone in this yellow painted pit that was rusting and peeling away, while there were blood and shit smears on the pads. But he knew the janitor couldn’t keep up with this. Especially if there were so many patients admitted in this hospital, and most of them seemed to be in the Disturbed Ward, and many of them were very disturbed, because Dr. Splinter constantly subjected them to this torture, constantly fed them drugs that made them crazier, gave them the needles pricked full of Thorazine that made them drool and relax their bodies so much that they didn’t care if they pissed themselves.

He wished he could reach the window, placed up so high in the padded and pillowed sky, that told of dreams and promises of a world that was much better than here, that was free and intoxicating in the smells of flowers and the wet autumn leaves and the vivid colors that his eyes could only briefly catch as he glanced at it, the clouds overcast and the world’s cold and bitterness that made you feel more alive than the cold and bitterness in the hospital’s vents. But it was warm and hot in here, to match Satan’s lair itself. He could see the nurses walking in and out of the shock therapy room, with each patient being wheeled out as awful as the last. They sang songs incoherently stringed together, they mumbled and screamed and constantly told the nurses that they were whores and bitches, with their faces forever unmoving, a pale powdered white sheen of porcelain, their fingers and nails sharp and colored of candy cane red, their lips puckered and their breasts bouncing and swaying and their heels clacking and their eyes the bluest shade of violet. He knew these weren’t regular nurses, as the staff very rarely looked as provocative and were as cold as they were, never caring of the conditions of their patients and only cruelly observing them from a distance, their eyes like sharp stabbing needles, that told him that they thought of their patients as nothing but wild animals that needed to be trained for a circus with tamers, the lobotomies and shockwaves and the pills and Thorazine, and nothing more.

But he wondered why their eyes were violet. Just like the Forgotten Children in the Chronics Ward. Maybe the nurses were vengeful ghosts, who lost their sanity long ago, their only release in treating Dr. Splinter’s most unstable patients with as much cruelty as they were treated with, never remembering how happy they were when they were children, before the mental illness struck them and they had to be in this ill-stricken place. He could see one nurse as her heels clicked and cackled when she approached his cell, gazing at him with as much concern as a serial murderer gazing upon the torturing of his victims as her blood flowed out of her, her breasts looking as plastic as a Barbie doll’s, as she turned the key in the lock and said to him, with all of her superficiality, with all her venomous viciousness, “Let’s go, Mr. Seabrooks. It’s time for your medicine, as prescribed by Dr. Robotnik. You still have your feet attached and not in restraints, follow me to the medicine room.”

The medicine room. Not the electroshock therapy room, as they would call it. A room where they would prescribe Mr. Seabrooks his medication, whether he wanted it, or not. And he just had the painful and fear-throbbing (as his heart began to throb in his chest as much as his head) realization that he couldn’t escape from the throes of the oddly colored pills this time. The nurses still haven’t let him out of his restraints, and there was no where to run, as the door at the end of the bright hallway was locked and required a special key to open. The patients grinned widely with a full set of rotted, almost completely black and nicotine-stained teeth. They chanted in unison with their screechy voices, the ones who were without restraints clapped and swung themselves against the cell’s bars, screaming and singing, “Mr. Seabrooks, it’s time for your medicine! Mr. Seabrooks, it’s time for your medicine! Your medicine! You’re getting the taste of your own medicine!” And they laughed and snickered and snackered, and the cells began to be so loud that Sonic wished he could cover his ears, as his eyes and teeth were clenched like the patient’s red fists against the bars, and he thought he could even see the nurses smirking, their violet eyes beaming, as he had no choice but to follow them as the clamor became louder, his ears were hurting even more and were throbbing as much as his head and heart were, as the patients cackled maniacally, bouncing in their cells, one with his hand out of the bars stretching for him, taunting him. “You’re going to get it, Mr. Seabrooks! You’re going to get it! You’re going to get a taste of your own medicine!” And he noticed that his last name, Mr. Seabrooks, was now said with a spittle of hate, their voices black and full of misery and melancholy and loathing, and he began to hate his last name, wishing that his father was named a different name than something as hated and despised as Seabrooks.

And of course he was going to get that bittersweet taste of his own medicine.

And so was this kid that Nack eyed in the middle of the street, getting the bittersweet taste of his knife, and he would get the bittersweet taste of his money. More to buy the yellow pills that gave him peace, the sweet leaf that made him forget of the pain that cotton and dye provided.

He thought for a moment he also had violet eyes, the same set of eyes that the little girl he saw nearby the hillbilly swing set on a trailer court as he rode down the street, but his eyes were blue, like his father’s, like that asshole prick who wanted to send him to work at this time, working for around eight hours a day for meager pay. Fuck that, he said to himself. I will make a life for myself by stealing and being high on the bittersweet pills and the leaf that one of my so-called friends is smoking in his trailer home right now…He was simply salivating for that taste of bud, the taste of relief and tranquility overcoming him like a sweet wave at the beaches he always looked at in pictures. He wondered if someday he could go to California. After all, he could smoke the stuff if he had proof that he had a “terminal” illness. He did indeed have a terminal illness. It was called “evil”. He knew his sins would make him die one day. He realized that all the things he was doing to these other kids, these other teachers, his father, were all bad things he shouldn’t have done in the first place, but he enjoyed it, he got that taste of shock and pleas of mercy and money when he initiated these actions, and he didn’t care at all that these people were hurting. He only cared for what he felt, and that was the taste of the thrill ride, the ride towards Hell, the ride that he knew would take him further and further from an actual animal to the primordial ooze and back into a single cell organism that only eats the others and cares nothing for it.

“Hey kid, what are you doing out here? Did you know that it’s getting late? Did you know that you could get…hurt?” he said, with a smirk showing off his one fang on the side of his face, glinting in the streetlights, along with the shine of his golden eyes like bright honey.  
“Fuck off, asshole.”  
“Now now, let’s not get hasty here. You certainly don’t want your mother or father to worry about you, hmm?”

He took out a blade that was as long as his overgrown fang, serrated at the end like small teeth, with a hilt made of ivory. He was proud of this knife he got at the black market for only ten dollars. It was worth every penny. And worth every penny out of the people he would threaten and stab with this beautiful, handcrafted sword he thought possibly came from the 1800’s, a time he simply didn’t know existed, as he never read his history books they gave him at the beginning of school at all.

He pressed the blade near his neck as he quickly held him from behind, the child completely immobile, completely still, as even a single movement would’ve caused a cut on the neck, a single tear of blood to spill. Nack could feel him about to cry, another tear about to flow from his eyes. Yes, they could cry all they wanted to, but it was only going to make him more sinister, more evil, as the dark seed inside him began to bloom into a black desiccated flower inside him, the black velvet curls beckoning him to just slit the child’s neck and take his money, just take everything and run away and don’t turn back, and if anyone ever found out about the murder, they would never suspect on who did it, because they would never be able to figure out who on this green beautiful Earth could hurt such an innocent child as this, one who probably only had enough money to afford some lunch at his shitty school which he knew was going to be greasy and filled with dog meat. Why yes, we certainly want our kids of tomorrow to be big and strong, don’t we? Don’t we? Don’t we?

We remember that moment where you were dumb enough to attempt suicide. Don’t we? Don’t we, Mr. Seabrooks? Don’t we? 

He tried to kill himself just what seemed to be years ago, after all. The memories of his last suicide attempt was faint, as he could only remember a pink blanket that was coiled like a rattlesnake, with buttermilk fangs and bones that were hollowed metal that he crushed (as he could still hear the sound of the metal twisting and snapping in his own hands that were blood-scarred), and he wondered why that was the only thing he could remember. That and cornflower blue eyes that stared at him, begging him why he wanted to kill himself. And he wasn’t sure why himself.

Did any of his friends try to stop him? Did Ambra, the nurse who said who would help him, noticed how depressed he was, and helped him of his misery? Was Knuckles there and tried to cheer him up? Did anyone else, if they weren’t locked up in the Chronics Ward and only seeing pitch black darkness forever in their vision? No. He noticed he was all alone in this world, as the only one who tried to “help” him were these nurses, who didn’t care much at all for him, but only wished for him to suffer as much as possible before he would be sent back to the Acute Ward. He could sense it that all they wanted was to torture the patients, to revel in the pain they felt ever since they were admitted in this Godforsaken hospital, and they hated him most of all, because Dr. Splinter was the only god they listened to now, and Dr. Splinter knew the power he had inside of him, and he wished for him to be stopped, so throw some lightning bolts in his head like Zeus, make him take medication that he kept refusing, make him into someone who was barely recognizable from the person who first entered this hospital expecting in that little pit in his heart that he could be in a much quieter place than Austin Lakes, that he didn’t much care for those bitches and whores anyways, especial]y that nurse he thrust a needle in her fine supple white neck.

He wanted to thrust the knife in this kid’s supple white neck, look how shiny it looked, how in the sunlight it would glow with such a nice shade of ruby red blood!

“Now, we can make this easy, or we can do this the hard way, little boy,” he sneered. “Give me some money, and I will let you go free. If not, then you know what’s going to happen to you, don’t you?”

The small boy could see the shine of the knife while night began to drown out the sun and it was immersed in the stars, and he wished he could go see the moon, as he realized that life was precious, because before you know it, a purple, golden-eyed weasel was going to put a knife against your throat and demand to take your lunch money, at any minute, at any second, at any…

“I don’t have any money, man. I mean it. I have nothing for you. So let me go…”

Nack took pride in his steel-toed shoes that he bought with his own (and some other people’s) money, as he kicked the kid’s leg with it, inflicting a searing pain on him that throbbed in the back of his knee, Nack quickly shoving his hand over his mouth, hiding him near the shadows, making sure that no one could see or hear the child in pain.

He was determined to make this child squeal like a pig. Simply for being alive. Simply for being happy. Simply for being normal.

“Give me whatever you got then if you don’t have any goddamned money. Anything. A quarter, a nickel, a dime, anything. And I might let you go.”

The child cussed underneath his breath, Nack seeing in the amber gold light a dollar and fifty cents. Even if it wasn’t enough just to buy one pill of Xanax, he took it anyways, but still pressed the knife near him. He knew he wasn’t through with him yet. He was like a cat that just trapped a mouse. They played with their victims before they swallowed them whole. 

“Hey, I gave you what you asked for, now…”  
“I have a question, little boy,” his voice being spewed in the boy’s ears with so much venomous hate, “but tell me of your mother and father. Do you think you have a good mom and dad? Are they still alive on this Earth? Does your father never approve of you, no matter how hard you work at his fucking factory of his, while you’re only making 3.50 an hour, while your mother is dead, rotting in the ground, never making your father completely sane again because apparently his father shot himself in the head? Can you answer me that? Huh?”

He thought he could hear the child whimper, and tears were collecting in his eyes, but they still remained inside him, and he hoped that this crazy weasel wouldn’t see his insane side. He hoped not. His father saw enough of that already.

The knife looked like it was going to fall and shatter before him, if knives could easily shatter as if they were made of clay. His eyes swiveled in the boy’s vision, and his breathing became harsher, the knife nearly made neat little beaded lines on his neck.

He wasn’t going to make it out alive or unharmed today, he thought.

This wasn’t like himself. Usually he was calm, cool, collected when he committed his crimes. But as he remembered his father, the fucking bastard that never loved him, that never ever said much of their mother when she died, the mother he wished he could remember, he suddenly was panicking, the knife feeling like it would slip from his grasp from all the sweat that was pouring from him, his voice full of fear and worry over how his life was all a fucking joke, all a fucking game to God. And he thought he was going to laugh, he was going to lose everything, he was going to become completely fucking insane.

He thought this would be the last he would see of himself.

Before he either became lobotomized, or he gave birth to a new soulless hedgehog who had less passion in his life than he did before.

It wasn’t going to be the end of his misery, the end of his suicide attempts that he could now barely remember.

He wished he could stare at his wrists and see how cold and purple they were, but the nurses forbade him. They thought he would open up those old wounds again, so they sealed him with plastic wrap and made it illegal to move his hands. To breathe a little more in his small, concave chest that felt so fragile against all this leather. He could tell the nurses despised him, and he wasn’t going to get out of this ward without more wounds, more scars that would fester underneath his skin, as the nurses’ pupils began to widen, as they knew this was their favorite part, to administer medication in these cows who were ready to be slaughtered, to be ready to be eaten by the American public and put on the grill on a hot summer day, not thinking of where the meat came from. He could moo and protest with his hooves all he wanted to, but she would only enjoy his struggling and his helplessness.

He needed medicine just to be told that exterminating your very own flame that was hollowed out inside your body was wrong. He needed pills to correct it. Injections. Electricity jabbing in his brain. Lobotomies. It was what he needed to be sane. He knew that the medicine wouldn’t be healing, wouldn’t be the right path to recovery, but bitter, and jagged and sharp and it would slice all of his organs as if he was swallowing a razor blade whole. He refused the medication many times, but now, the nurses would force it upon him, shove all the liquids and pills and needles down his throat, and no one could save him, no one could stop them, and he couldn’t do the same for himself. He was as hopelessly insane as the rest of the patients in the ward, where he could still hear their chanting and shrieks when the icy nurse closed the steel door, him being completely at her mercy, the cold-hearted bitch who would give him just what he deserved. 

She didn’t give him a warm smile, a look of reassurance as the medicine he was going to take was going to make him better, only hate and disdain for him, as he knew her heart was ripped and torn and broken many years ago, when she first entered this hospital back in 1973, where she was treated for depression and a suicide attempt, and was only led to her death, to the thing that made her come here in the first place, the white pills that looked like powdered glass shards.

He wished he could take some fucking Xanax right now. The fucking white powder that made him okay and right as rain.

The blade was shaking. He began to breathe and nearly choke with how many breaths he took right in that very second, as the child began to feel even worse fear, that he wouldn’t make it out of here alive because this weasel was a fucking maniac, and he wet his pants, and he reached for his cell phone, wishing to call 911.

“Hey man, if you don’t let me go right now, I’m going to call…”  
Yes, make him call 911. Make him take your life and break it. Go to jail. Go to juvie. Become a completely different man. A man your father never wanted to be. Yes, make him call that wonderful number that told of truths and promises, that told you you would be rescued, you would be saved, you would be…

“Mr. Seabrooks.” They never referred to their patients by their first names. Just a “Mr.” Or “Ms.” And their last name. Her fists were just as white as her face as she held the long, thick needle in her arms, almost cradling it like a newborn infant that came out of her white porcelain womb, as her eyes seemed to stare into his fear inside him, as the hands wrapped up in his chest were beginning to shake and throb, as his legs almost buckled under his stress and the weight of the leather. “We’re prescribing you Haldol, Tegretol, and Elavil. Are there questions, any questions at all about the medication you’re taking, Mr. Seabrooks? Speak now, before I have to administer them. You only have 30 seconds.”

He never heard of any of these medications, except he might’ve heard them in a 1960’s movie where the main character was in a psychiatric ward. But he was soon becoming that main character, and this was no longer the 1960’s. It was nearly 2010, and he was prescribed these medications that were no longer recommended to patients anymore, as they often had the adverse effect. She held the needle in her hand like a spear, and he thought he could catch a smirk on her face, the red fat lips curving like red petals to a candied rose. “Turn around, Mr. Seabrooks, so I can give you your medicine. It’s only going to hurt a little bit.”

“Fat fucking chance, you fucking bitch!”

The boy pressed 9, and proceeded to press the 1s quickly while Nack no longer paid any attention to his hands, as he slipped him from his grasp and managed to hear the voice of the man on the other line, speaking, “This is 911, what’s your emergency?”

“You fucking son of a bitch!”

The boy stood silently, expecting any pain from the cut of the knife. He expected more out of him, he expected him to kill him right at that very moment, as he could see his eyes now looking more like a slits from a snake, his fang shining as much as his knife, now drizzled with blood, the streaks of what looked like to him strawberry jam, as pitch black it was all glopped together like that, the blood of a child, not full of oxygen, not full of the nutrients he thought he had.

He knew that this wasn’t good, and he didn’t want to look. Please don’t let me look please don’t let me please don’t let me look…

“Hello? This is 911, what’s your emergency? Is there anything going on out there? Hello?”

He thought he could see those violet eyes again, watching, laughing at him. Mocking him.

I'd listen to the words he'd say…  
But in his voice I heard decay…

He tried to back away from the nurse, who was lurching closer, her violet eyes sparkling in the sunlight, thinking he could see a hint of bloody scarlet inside them, as if she was determined, so determined for him to take his medication like a good boy, that it lit up and flared that fire inside her, the spark of pain and masochism. He thought he could hear a small trickle of laughter, as she clicked her long red nails against the liquid in that glass case inside the big needle, the long slender metal nose coming closer, the medicine dripping off it. He could tell she was only taunting him and trying to scare him as much as she could. She enjoyed the pain and misery in her patients. She enjoyed the looks on their faces before they were completely submitted to her will, hers and the King of Spades, the little idol god she worshiped. 

He began to growl and snarl, his ears turned low. He was submitting himself to his animal instincts. His teeth and fangs were propped open. His eyes also had that spark of fire, that ire of anger, as the needle nearly stabbed him in the chest. He couldn’t get back from her any further. She had him in the corner, and her long slender nails gripped his shoulder with the strength of a giant, attempting to turn him around so she could insert the Haldol in his buttocks, where it was absorbed the quickest.

The boy crawled to where his phone landed in the pavement, hoping that it was still alive, that it was still crackling with the gentle man’s voice that wanted to take him away from this awful animal and back into the loving arms of his parents. But Nack…for all he knew, he never had parents. He never had his father love him. Not even once. His mother, he hardly remembered her. The boy clutched his stomach, it bleeding a red river down his body, and he could see tears in his eyes, and Nack thought he was going to laugh at that moment, as the violet eyes continued to stare, continued to burn through him, continued to wish for his death, wish for his sanity to be gone.

“Go ahead! Laugh! Laugh!” he shrieked, still holding the knife close to him, slowly realizing the boy was gone and injured and reaching the phone and possibly talking to the man on the line, but he didn’t care, he didn’t care now that he might go to juvie or jail for a couple years for attempted murder, even if he didn’t mean to stab the boy in the first place. He wanted to show the violet eyes, the girl with the blue china dress, holding onto her teddy bear, that he was a worthy creature, a worthy creature worth showing in God’s eyes, and he thought tears were seeping out of his eyes as her stare continued to tear into him, making him scared of this supernatural spirit but still he had no sympathy for the damn boy, who was sniveling and crying for his daddy on the phone. He wished he could call his daddy. But he was a fake daddy. A daddy made of plastic and cellophane. Plastic and cellophane wasn’t so nice to hug unlike blood and flesh.

The plastic face forced to portray…  
All the insides left cold and gray…

“Now now Mr. Seabrooks, the sooner we get this done, the better. Maybe I’ll even give you a lollipop if you take your medication, like good boys in this hospital are supposed to do. Turn around, Seabrooks. Then you can go back to your cell. You are in due for more electroshock therapies.”

His eyes shook, his heart beat was becoming faster in his small, glass ribbed chest. Of course they still had him in restraints. Of course they were doing this to him, subjecting him to this horror. Because they wanted him to become the King of Spades’ new slave, to pave the way for his world, made with the bloodied and scarred wrists of everyone he killed, and he was going to be next. He knew he wasn’t going to live long in this ward. He could feel a lobotomy, his head throbbing (that he wished he could hold with his encased hands) just thinking of the ice spike traveling down his brain and stabbing it until he was no longer a hedgehog but nothing at all, someone who didn’t had a soul, any strength or personality or core or mercy or anything resembling both a hedgehog or human. His head ran, and he wished he could run too, away from this hospital, away from Wonderland and away from Texas, to New York or California, those wonderful, piggy places that told him that he could achieve his piggy dreams, of being a movie star, an athlete, a writer writing everyday with his typewriter clickety clacking like his mind and the nurse’s heels, and his heart began to shutter and shake, and he thought his glass shard ribs would break against the weight of her plastic breasts that were pushing up against him, as she tried to turn him around. His fangs were bared, even if he had one missing, saliva dripped from his mouth like a wolf hungering for his new victim he saw desperate in the cold winter tundra, and his eyes flared up, as he launched himself against the nurse’s arm, and tore into her, blood streaming down her white pale slender feminine arm.

His heart was beating quick, thundering just as much as the electroshock machines they were using in the next room, the tremor of the patients voices as they continued to chant that Mr. Seabrooks needed to take his medicine. He was using the only defense he could think of now, as he knew he had to fight back, as his feet kicked the large needle out of her hands and stomped on her heely feet, her screaming in near ecstasy and moaning as if she enjoyed the pain, her violet eyes flashing like fire, little purple sparkles of gems. She held Sonic against her with her bloody nails as blood dripped from her arm, streaming down and leaking onto the floor, a puddle of it collecting on the blue mercury colored steel. Although the pain he could imagine was intense, as he thought he was biting deep into her muscles and veins, she still wouldn’t let go as her hold was like a vice grip, and she latched onto him like bones and muscles in a body while her one needle-sharp claw reached for the long needle that laid on the floor, still awaiting to be injected in someone’s ass, as she shrieked, “You little piece of shit! I told you to stay still, Mr. Seabrooks! Auntie Nurse doesn’t want to play your childish games! Auntie Nurse wants to calm you down and make you into a sane citizen of society again! Don’t you want that, Mr. Seabrooks? Don’t you want the only thing that will you make you a desirable person in anyone’s eyes?”  
“They said…they said…” he choked, with snot coming from his nose, tears blinding his eyes, blood seeping from his body, his hand trying to block the flow, rocking back and forth. “They said they’ll be sending someone to help me…someone who’s going to make me okay…”  
“You will be okay, Max…you will be okay…you know your mommy and daddy love you, right? We both think you’re a very smart, desirable…”

Nack rode his bicycle down the street, hearing no more. It was going to make him sick. 

As he rode down the street, near a bread shop as he could smell the fires cradling and baking the dough inside of their concave little ovens, he could see the red and blue lights becoming bigger by the seconds, his eyes being blinded by them and his ears filled with the shrieks of sirens. As he stopped, waiting for the policemen to come by, he looked at the little girl behind him, her violet eyes casted, her holding onto her teddy bear so tight he thought his head was going to fall.

“You’re scared, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Hello Mr. Nack, good night we’re having, aren’t we?”  
He knew there was no escaping them. There was nothing he could do.

He showed the officer his blade, covered with the thickest, darkest of bloods he’s seen on a blade. Because Nack thought those types of bloods belonged to a child.

“I’m the one you want. Take me away. I’ll go quietly.”

You’re scared, aren’t you?

There is a place that still remains…  
It eats the fear, it eats the pain…

He could hear his teeth diving deep into the bone, her arm still bleeding a torrent on the floor, her eyes still burning with a vividness of amethysts, as she moaned, reveling in her punishment as if it was a fetish of hers, her hands click clacking to reach the Haldol, Sonic’s quills rising and pricking her and thorning her but even if he knew that Dr. Splinter himself couldn’t be in this much pain and continue to move, she seemed to enjoy it like sexual pleasure, her red lips panting, Sonic able to feel the weight of her breasts on his back (and they did feel plastic and as smooth as rubber balls, and as heavy as lead) and as he struggled and fought against her weight on top of him as he screamed as he could feel his heart being shattered, his lungs constricted that he had to let go of her arm and choke and gasp for air, her red velvet fingertips reaching the needle, as she cackled heinously as she rose it in midair, then stabbed him in the rear, the needle inserted, her pushing down the lever quickly, the Haldol being injected inside him.

“See what your reward is by being a good boy, Mr. Seabrooks? Don’t you see how nice it feels to have your insides completely numb, your organs cold and rotting, your brain no longer caring of your friends and family, that you’re all alone in this world, that you would never know joy and happiness again? I love that feeling, Mr. Seabrooks. I love complete misery and loneliness. I drink a pitcher of black depression as black as your heart, charred and burned from your mental illness, the bipolar inside your veins. Yes Mr. Seabrooks, I think you’ll come to enjoy the Disturbed Ward, yes, in fact, you may even miss it when we send you back to the Acutes after the medicine is in your system and your brain gets more electro-convulsive therapy. You will soon become as dead as us, Mr. Seabrooks; you will become a shell of your former, much fiery self. I am trimming down all the flames inside your mind, I am setting the heat down low, soon you will be cold and manufactured with ice, your soul will no longer know what the full feeling of being alive is. You will only face death, near death, as your soul begins to whither and die down.”

His body went limp. He could feel his heart and lungs and everything inside him slow down, his eyes drooped to stare at the cold metallic floor, his face covered in blood, but yet he couldn’t care anymore, as he felt his brain slowing down, his feet no longer kicking and flailing. There was nothing more he could to fight in this battle. He was defeated. Once the Haldol was inside you, you were stopped, as your blood flows with lead.

The nurse rose, smirking. Her job was halfway done. Her legs were arched above him, as she thrust her heels onto the floor, squarely missing his head, she wishing she could smash it and make it explode like a watermelons connected to wires of electricity, but her red chipped nails like blood stains reached out for him, grabbing him by the scruff of his dirty neck, and he could only be motionless, his eyes feeling like iron rusted lids (he thought he could smell the bell jars inside here, the smell of ashes and burnt bodies). He could tell by the sound of her alluring voice, coming from the red lips that were cut and bleeding, that she wanted to show him his place, as mockingly as possible, to show that he was nothing but a worthless patient, someone who had no control of his life, and the staff knew how fragile it was, how it was made of blue and white china proudly displayed in front of the hospital when they entered, but as soon as they were inside, they lost everything, as they simply took it and smashed it on the floor, losing nothing but their shells, the little disgusting cockroaches they were, especially those in the Chronics Ward, who lived with the other bugs, the other cicadas and rodents and flies and maggots. As he was in midair, staring at the cold blue gray walls and the pictures of Dr. Robotnik and Dr. Splinter smiling with wide white grins, he thought he was entering heaven from God who was saving him from this Hell as he finally listened to Sonic’s prayer on his answering machine as he felt dead, his heart beat faint and his breathing barely discernible in the nurse’s fingers, his face shadowed by the darkness of the room as the blinds shadowed the sunlight, as she said, “Mr. Seabrooks, do you realize who you are dealing with here? Do you realize who it is you’re fighting? Answer me, Mr. Seabrooks. Answer me who you believe you’re fighting. Answer me damn you!”

“Damn it Nack, do you realize who you’re dealing with here? This is the police! The P-O-L-I-C-E! Why did you tell them that you did this? A crime you never committed? I know my son is much better than this, stabbing a child simply just for a dollar and fifty cents…”

He smiled. He was delusional. As most people were before they discovered the truth.

“No dad, I actually did do it. I showed the police the knife I used to stab him. They said they were going to give me a lighter sentence if I admitted to the crime and was all remorseful and stuff, but I did it. I nearly killed him. His parents are never going to forgive me. And you know what’s the funny thing, dad? I actually knew you were going to have this reaction, and I really don’t care. I really don’t.”

His father’s breath was reflected in the pane of glass, Nack feeling like it was winter already, but he had to remind himself that it was only October, the month where the wind got cold enough to make your breath into frosted fire, into a stream of smoke. And he reminded himself that he needed cigarettes. It’s been a while since he had a taste of Marlboros on his tongue. And he hated it and wished he could pawn them off someone else again, not having to watch his father’s dramatic expression, as he shouted, “My son…going to juvenile hall…becoming nothing but a common criminal? Am I hearing that…right?”

“Yes.” He nodded. “And also, if you want to no longer be a part of my life, then I understand. I never was a part of yours anyways. You simply wanted me to work, wanted me to be your little slave while I dyed and put the threads together nearly everyday of the fucking year, forcing a child into work, barely realizing that’s against the law. I told the officers all about you, and they’re going to put you in jail too. In fact, they’re waiting outside of this place, ready to put you through the court system too. And you know what? I’m not defending you. I’m going to let go of you. I will become everything you ever hated, dad. I will become everything you never wanted me to be, dad. I will become dead to you. And you’re dead to me too. Goodbye father, it was nice knowing you. Ta-ta. See you on the other side, maybe.” He continued to smirk at him, as he imagined the cigarette smoke streaming from his mouth, blowing it in his father’s face, like he used to do to his teachers what seemed to be so long ago.

Nack watched as his father was led to the police car outside of the windows, cursing and wishing he could fight back, but he took the handcuffs quietly, he went inside the police car quietly, and he drove off quietly, and he disappeared quietly out of his life.

He disappeared as quietly as a fad, a dissolving animal body at the side of the road. His father was dead, decayed, rotting flesh that was being eaten alive by maggots and flies. He never saw him again after that.

And Nack asked the kid in his cell as soon as he was led back if he could get him some cigarettes.

“I’ll try. Hey, wasn’t that your father out there?”  
“Oh, him? Nah, he’s not my father,” he said, as he returned to reading his magazine, looking at how good the food looked and wishing this place didn’t sell food that was possibly covered in hairy shit before it was served to all of these kids in this jail. We’re feeding the future of America well, Nack repeated.

“Then why did he visit you?”  
“Hey, are you going to get my cigs or not? You know what’s going to happen if you ask more questions!”  
“Alright man, sheesh, I know people in here usually have daddy issues, but goddamn, you don’t have to spit it in my face. Just be like the rest of us and not have a father ever since you were born.”

He wished he never had a father in the first place.

He thought it was less painful than a father who was there, but never said he loved them. Not even if he worked in his factories for so long. Not even if he cared enough about his son to send him to a psychologist about his madness, the madness that was beginning to eat away at his bones, as he thought he could still see the violet eyed, white faced girl look at him, laughing and giggling, saying, “You’re glad you’re in a different world now, aren’t you?”

The sweetest price he'll have to pay…  
The day the whole world went away…

He groaned. His body was aching and it quivered as if his skin was becoming aware of itself and wanting to peel itself away from him, that it didn’t belong on his body. He closed his eyes, as he thought he was losing consciousness on account of the drug, the nurse’s nails digging into his neck, the medicine making him so numb he couldn’t feel them making him bleed.

“I’m fighting the King of Spades,” he mumbled. “I’m fighting the King of Spades.”  
“You are, Mr. Seabrooks. But do you not realize the full length of his power? It’s endless. He has full control of this hospital. We are merely his servants inside this ward, Mr. Seabrooks, and he told us all about you, that you would struggle like this, that you had an incredible power inside you, that his little friend for years, named Mr. Shadow, is helping you on this little journey you’re undergoing. But this journey is about to come to an end, Mr. Seabrooks. The King of Spades ordered you to stay in this ward a little bit, to torture your body and mind even more before we send you back to the Acute Ward. We’re giving you more shocks, we’re ripping out more springs and wires, the things that made you a little saner, the things you had when you came in here in the first place, with your little bipolar, with your incident you where you stabbed a nurse in the neck with a needle. Now we know all about you, Mr. Seabrooks. We want you to be even more beaten, even more torn, even more worn down than what you already were. You will become only a maggot, Mr. Seabrooks. A maggot from a fly. Your brain will be sculpted from the little balls of mercury we have in our thermometers, we will make little slits to make it bleed, we will perform a vivisection and find out all about your machinery and not bother to stitch you back up. Your organs will bleed, your body will break, your mind will be in flames, we will break you down to where there isn’t a little bit of you left, Mr. Seabrooks. You will live, but you certainly won’t live with what sanity you have left.”  
“Which is barely any,” he muttered, his eyes no longer having that vitality, looking dull, no longer looking green, but black. “I barely had any sanity in the first place…”

He wished he could slip off into unconsciousness. He wished his torture would be over. He wished he was back in the Acutes Ward, with the cold air that benumbed his body, with the staff that somewhat cared, with his friends he wanted to appoint in his army, with Ambra, with the shitty food, with the medicine he could be free to not choose, with a comforting bed that always soothed his pain and his scars and his beaten mind as he slipped off to dreams. He couldn’t fight against the Disturbed Ward. They were too powerful, with their restraints, with their Haldol, with their electro machines, and he wished he would die right at that moment, to never be in Wonderland again, to be in heaven with God, where he would realize that his little agnostic who wanted to believe in him was suffering, and now he only wanted peace, he wanted to be a good Christian like his parents, he wanted to never again be in the little hellhole that was in Austin, Texas, the little hellhole filled with people who lived on Bibles and hated the gays and hated the murderers by giving them a much more lethal dose of the electroshock therapy, he wished when he woke up he would be in New York, in a completely new hospital, a nice one, but he knew it was only a useless dream, as the nurse forced him to swallow his other medicine, his Tegretol and Elavil, and before he was sent back to his cell, the patients clapping and laughing and cheering and screaming, he fell asleep, the Haldol taking him like waves of the ocean, making him slip to the deep black sea of misery.

The day the whole world went away…

He felt he was no longer on planet Earth, a planet that some people could see joy out of, a planet where people were cured of their diseases, a planet where soon everything got better.

The world he was in didn’t heal. It constantly deteriorated. It constantly fell apart the more he breathed in it. It was a world that constantly died, constantly got worse, constantly grew darker and darker the more he lived inside of it, and he wished by just praying to God he could get out of that world, and wish it away, and be back on planet Earth, the world that held so much promise, held so much hope and light and glimmer…

Soon the world he was in faded in his vision, the yellows and browns and whites becoming blurred smears, like smeared shit, like smeared vomit, and he fell asleep, into his own dream world, and he could only wish the world inside there was better than this one.


End file.
